How to Take Notes for Work - Meeting Minutes Explained

One of the things you will frequently do in the first years of your career, both in professional services, in consulting, and also in the corporate world, is writing meeting minutes. So writing and distributing notes after important meetings. So in this video today, I want to share some crucial advice on how to write and structure meeting minutes in the style of large consulting firms such as McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. So welcome to a new Coffee Break here on my channel from learning the place where I want to help you to succeed in the first years of your career. So let's get started. I prepared for you a helpful template based on a document that I frequently use to take meeting minutes in my time in consulting. If you want to follow along, pause the video, access the video description to get the link and download the template for free. Let's start with the header of the meeting minutes template. Here I'd recommend you to clearly mention what type of meeting it is and also mention that this is now the meeting minutes that you would be currently looking at. Now the next section. Here let's mention the date, the location, and the participants. So when did the meeting take place? Where did it happen? So is it an online meeting or was there any specific meeting room, any specific meeting location? And then let's also mention participants. So for more important meetings, maybe board meetings, it's even legally required to have a clear list of attendees in the meeting minutes. So make sure that this is included for you as well. And then I'd recommend you to take the minutes with a simple structure. And here you will write down all the action items, right? So this is not intended to be used as you writing down every single thing that someone might have said. This is usually not how you write meeting minutes. But instead, you focus on three main points, three main items that you want to write down. First, insights. Second, tasks. Third, decisions. So let's start with the first, insights. So this is a piece of insight that some person shared in the meeting. Usually, you're not repeating things, which are already part of the meeting document anyways. But if someone is sharing a point, then it's getting picked up on in the meeting, but then it's getting discussed in the meeting, you can write this down here as an insight. So to some extent, this might be a little bit subjective, what exactly you write down here, make sure that these points are relevant. So if you're filling out this template, during a meeting, you are writing down here the correct type of item that you're referring to here, for instance, I for insight, you're writing down all the insight here into the cell. And then you also you're mentioning who is the responsible person or the owner in this example, who shared the insight in the meeting, first type of items, second types, tasks. So these are the to dos, right? So these are things that someone now is asked to you with the letter T. Here, for instance, someone is asked to investigate the drivers of the cost per lead increase and potential measures to reduce the cost to historical averages until the next steering committee. Here now you can write down who's supposed to do this, the responsible person, Lisa in this example, next D a decision. So the people meeting have made a certain decision, let's imagine that this is a steering committee, maybe the board comes together. And here, this was about a budget approval that was decided in this meeting for decisions, you might also want to write down whether they are unanimous, or whether somewhere in favor or against it to take note of that as well. And over time during the meeting, you can fill out add additional points here to the sheet based on the information that we just discussed. And then at the end of the meeting, you will send an email to all the people attending the meeting, adding the Excel table here with the meeting minutes, and then ask everyone to review it a potential let you know whether anyone feels like he or she has been misrepresented. If this is a recurring series of meetings, as it's usually the case with for instance, steering committees or board meetings, you might want to copy this tab several times for every meeting that is taking place, then you can just change here the date for the respective meeting. And then also keep always the meeting minutes of prior dates in here as a history for future reference. So whenever I use this structure like this to write down meeting minutes as a more junior consultant, maybe also more senior one, I usually always got very positive feedback. I do hope that this template helps you as well to write your meeting minutes. Again, you find it as a free download in the video description, feel free to check it out. If you want to learn more about taking notes, I will link above another video I did on note taking techniques. But if you are really serious to develop yourself professionally, I recently created my new communications and slide writing academy. This is the firm learning educational flagship offering. If you're interested to transform your career and learn essential skills as taught in such as McKinsey, BCG, and Dane.