How many times have you sat in a meeting and someone has said ‘oh, can you take the minutes?’. Perhaps there is no minute taker, and the Chair is doing that as well as trying to hold the meeting. Maybe, you’ve received minutes and thought ‘that’s not what I said’, or something important has been completely missed. Too many times, probably.
Minute taking is an art, and it can be time consuming and difficult. It’s not an easy skill to interpret what you hear and distil it down into concise but accurate minutes. If someone from the business is taking the minutes, it can be hard for them to distinguish between what is important to THEM and what is important to the BUSINESS. Sometimes, you get a personal viewpoint coming through the minutes, which isn’t appropriate and isn’t an accurate record of what was discussed.
Outsourcing the taking of your minutes can really help with these issues. Having someone external attending on behalf of the company means that there’s no personal angle coming through and there’s no bias. As well, you don’t get the ‘accidental slippage’ of sensitive or confidential material percolating through the office like a bad smell – dealing with rumour or leaks of sensitive material can be time consuming, and can bring office morale down tremendously.
You can specify how detailed you want the minutes to be, and you’ll get them back in a timely manner. Specialist minute takers can really take the pressure off of your secretary/PA/member of the meeting and enables them to fulfil their main role.
Besides, who really likes taking minutes?
(Us. Because we love it.)