To add to the discussion, meeting minutes allows the team to ensure that every action is accounted for. Also a missing member can be brought up to speed with the meeting minutes and then briefly supplemented with a 5-10 minute information session to clarify any questions he or she may have in base of that. Meeting minutes are also used as a legal document in the sense as proof that a particular meeting took place. From my experience working in CAPA investigations I always document attendance to ensure that we have proof that we have met. Also some actions within the investigation require additional meetings with outside personnel so meeting minutes provides proof that the action was completed so that CAPA action(s) are completed with evidence.
I believe that meeting minutes are extremely important, even so that there is a person at my job that would take notes during the meeting and then type it up afterwards and send it to everyone. I have seen in many instances where having note can show how unproductive some meeting has been when there is no clear solution to a problem. This would guide the involved parties to change the approach to solving the problem.
Minutes are used to document business conducted at a meeting. Typically, they will describe the events of a meeting, include a list of participants, record issues discussed and decisions made concerning these issues. Minutes can also be used as proof that a meeting took place to provide reference for those who were unable to attend.the ICSA have recently listed their minimum expectations for minute taking which includes: The key points of the meeting, decisions made and the reason for them, agreed actions, all minutes should be clear, and concise and free from any ambiguity.
All minutes are very important for a couple of reasons. They offer legal protection; they represent the actions of the board and company leadership. They help to provide structure, and how the members of the meeting came up with any decision. Minutes drive action, and act as measuring stick or a template. Finally they state ownership, so the company knows who voted for what.
Meeting minutes are important. You possibly can't remember everything in the meeting and your personal notes will only show the thoughts you had in your head during the meeting. The minutes are important because it'll allow you to go back to and remember important parts of the meeting and find out if you were assigned anything from the meeting.
Minutes are also legal documents that can be used as evidence in case of audits. They contain relevant information about the meeting such as who is there and what they said during meetings. When taking meeting minutes, there are also rules based on Robert's Rule of Conduct. With this, you are able to structurally go through the meeting.
It can also be used to keep other members of the team in track by showing their schedules and assignments.
A whole lot as been said but will like to add that Good meeting minutes help drive a plan of action for your leadership team and employees. Help in the structure and state ownership.
I agree that meetings are important, but often many people do not see their importance. Taking minutes in a meeting requires skill, especially since the minute taker has to follow what the people in the meeting are saying and document even the most confusing debates. Although most meetings have a minute maker, an individual can decide to take his or her own minutes and then make a comparison when what the minute maker has. I’ve seen many people who cannot remember what the meeting was about shortly after it ends. In this age of smartphones and computers, one can easily get distracted while in the meeting. Minutes come to the rescue of such individuals when they need to know what was discussed in the meeting.
It is probably not much of a stretch to say that the last thing you or your staff wants to do at a company meeting is to take the minutes, but it’s an important and often necessary task. Following are five important reasons for making sure you have someone take clear minutes at your next meeting.
They offer legal protection. Minutes are important details that you can’t ignore if you want to keep your business in line with state laws, and to back up your tax returns. Minutes represent the actions of the board and company leadership, and are considered legal documents by auditors, the Internal Revenue Service, and the courts. Legal experts will maintain that if an action isn’t in the minutes, it didn’t happen.
They provide structure. Even though there is no standardized format for meeting minutes, the IRS and the courts consider it important that you made a reasonable effort to report the facts of the meeting. Therefore, make sure your minute taker sufficiently describes how board members arrived at reasonable decisions. The minute taker should also include the name of the organization, the date and time of the meeting, who called it to order, and who attended. If there’s a quorum, they should also note all motions made, any conflicts of interest, if any members abstained from voting, when the meeting ended, and who developed the minutes. Meeting minutes must then be approved at the next meeting by the leadership team.
They drive action. Good meeting minutes help drive a plan of action for your leadership team and employees. They clarify how, when, why, and by whom decisions were made. They map out a plan for the action items — which helps get the work done — and they later provide valuable information to those team members who aren’t able to attend the meeting.
They act as a measuring stick. Minutes record meeting decisions, which makes them a useful review document when it comes time to measure progress. They also act as an accountability tool because they make it clear who’s duty it was to perform which action. Be sure to check out Minutes of Meeting of the Board of Directors to view a template for the minutes of a board of directors meeting of a corporation.
They state ownership. When votes are recorded and individual names are listed alongside each vote, it serves multiple purposes. First, it tells the board and leadership team who voted for what. This gives the board member some possible legal protection if the majority approved an issue and a lawsuit is filed. Second, if one particular board member abstained on the decision, or voted against the majority, it sets them apart from the suit.
Minutes for meetings are very crucial to a company because it keeps track of everything and what everyone said. We go to many meetings every week and sometime we have more than one meeting a day also. We can not possibly remember every single detail from each meeting so it is good to have document to read what took place in the meeting. From my previous experience, I have actually had to take notes in the meetings for a design review. It was a good experience because I have learned what was important to note and what was not needed to be document. But what I thought where the minute meetings were very useful was for design reviews. It the very first stages of the product, everyone will have inputs and it is important to take note of it. We could record the action plans for the next meetings and things like that.
As students learning about the various good practices and regulations of the Medical Device Industry, we encounter the importance of proper documentation again and again. Strong documentation is not only incredibly important, but is a cornerstone of this industry. Minutes, of course, is an important component of this focus on documentation.
Perhaps the most essential reason for minutes is that they help ensure that a meeting had a purpose. Any group of people can come together and talk and share great ideas, but the meeting will be useless if it is never followed up on. Without the accountability that comes from a record that includes the tasks assigned to people, meetings may end up losing almost all utility. Aside from this, minutes help people reference ideas that may have been forgotten, help determine progress, and provide potential legal protection if need be. This last point has been previously mentioned and becomes especially essential when a team is accountable to shareholders or government agencies, particularly if votes are regularly held in meetings.
There have been countless amount of times where minutes served its actual purpose of re-capping what was said at the meeting and what new deadlines were established that needed to get done. Even for people that were not at the meeting, they can easily follow what was going on and what they missed and any responsibilities that they may have or need to address. I can barely remember what I had for lunch, so when there are future meetings, it is important to take notes and create a timeline to make sure that deadlines are being met and that everyone is staying on top of their game.
There are certainly times where I have missed meetings and the minutes were emailed to me to catch me up on what I missed. I believe that it has saved me quite a bit from asking around and trying to get information from other busy members of the organization. It also tells me what I have to do and get done by the next meetings and allows me to keep a schedule for myself. I do believe that these are very important and should remain in every meeting, designating one person to take them and email the general members.
Meeting minutes are very important in every company I have worked for since graduating. The current company I work for uses sharepoint to track all meeting minutes. All changes to regulations that are discussed are documented. On several occasions I have referenced these documents for daily tasks. This document also helps when one is out of office for a prolonged period. Meeting minutes is also used for taking attendance of participants, items covered during the meeting, decisions taken, follow-up actions if any, due dates and also captures all other information discussed by the various teams.
Taking minutes is an important aspect of meetings. The biggest legal reason of minutes is that it can be considered as a legal document. The minutes contain the action of the company and important action details. This means that this document can be audited and it can either help or harm the cause with the company. Minutes also serve has an accomplishment marker. In each meeting, what has been completed and what needs to be done is recorded by the updates of various members of the team. Therefore, ideally there should be new updates for each meeting, hence a good tool to measure progress and drive workers to complete their assigned tasks. And lastly, the minutes provide an organized documents of thoughts, opinions and technical information in one place. Making it efficient in using one document to retrieve information. Thus, the practice of writing minutes is important.
In addition to the detailed outline of meeting minutes made by woolynn and others above, I would like to add that the minutes are not an exact transcription of what each individual had said in the meeting, rather a comprehensive summary of the main points that were discussed. It should, however, show ownership of major ideas and decisions made as the company moves forward. Without these minutes, the participants must rely on the memory of the other participants. This is not a good plan fro a wide variety of reasons.
Lastly, it is also imperative that a good meeting minute scribe distribute the meeting minutes within 24 hours of the meeting taking place. This ensures a quick follow up on all main points that were discussed in the meeting and enforces/ reminds the goals and objectives set. In addition, it also serves as a quick, yet comprehensive summary of the meeting for all those essential personal to read if they could not attend the actual meeting. The absent individuals should be able to read the minutes in a reasonable amount of time and be just as informed about the companies present/ future direction as if they had actually sat for the meeting.
Of course in the medical device industry they say “if its not documented, it didn’t happen.” So capturing decisions made and the logic behind the scope of the discussion is always valuable. In my personal experience, I’ve worked on Design Changes with as little as 2 design reviews and one I am working on now has at least 6. This project is based around expanding sells to the china market, so we have to make our product meet their regulations. There are documents flying around in Chinese, there are changes to the design input requirements, and there are labeling updates, and project scope changes so needless to say this is a huge cross functional effort. I think the most critical thing I’ve done was documenting review of documentation before we send them to CQC and review of documents in Chinese with an in country representative from China Regulatory. This project is very dynamic and a culmination of decisions made by multiple people so I and glad that the design reviews allows traceability and transparency of the project. Essentially, I feel like I am leaving bread crumbs leading to the end of this project.
I have been in many more meetings outside of the industry than I have meetings within the industry. In my fraternity we take very detailed minutes. Even though may seem this as unnecessary for a social organization but it is extremely helpful for event planning, and also returning to minutes to see whether a rule was established that someone is saying they did not know about. At the beginning of our meetings the secretary’s ( the person who writes the minutes) begins his report with holding a vote to accept the minutes from the previous meeting. This is an effort to stop anyone from saying they are not aware of something later on. Anyway that does not agree to the vote has to explain what about the minutes they are not agreeing with. This helps force people to be a little more meticulous when they are reading through the previous minutes.
