To write or not to write meeting notes

Ksenia
11 replies
Happy Monday everyone! 👋 What's your thoughts on meeting notes? I'm running a research to better understand difference between remote teams vs co-located team's meeting. Could you please share your experience? Should only take about 3 minutes. https://forms.gle/jUkJShE3Vq3UK4gf7 Or post here: Does any part of your team work remotely? Does your team capture meeting notes? If yes, why is it important to have them? If no, why is it not important? Where do you write them? How do you use them after the meeting?

Replies

Abadesi
Research shows that writing things down helps us remember better so I always have a notebook on me, including in meetings! I refer back to them later. I find it much more helpful to do analog notes over typing.
Ksenia
@abadesi thanks for sharing! interesting, what if someone else typed it and you just refer back - will it still works? If making notes available to all participants is smt that you find important, subscribe to our coming soon page https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
Kees de Kooter
We currently don't be we should! It's what @patio11 says on twitter: "In addition to assisting remote workers, a commitment to a written culture helps quickly moving organizations by making sure that people execute on decisions made even if they were not yet hired when the decision was made." (see https://twitter.com/patio11/stat...)
Ksenia
@patio11 @kees_de_kooter So true, it's crucial to have a log of conversation, especially for the remote teams. We're planing to ship Chrome Extension that will capture all transcription for the remote meetings. How does it sound for you? https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
Tony Territo
I, too, always carry a notepad for notes whether on a remote meeting or in-person. I find that it doesn't improve my memory but does provide me with an outline of important notes / goals.
Ksenia
@tony_territo thanks for sharing! Do you find it time consuming to take them during remote meetings? We're planing to ship some stuff to help teams save time on writing them - https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
Tony Territo
@ksenia_svechnikova That's a pretty sweet concept. It's much easier to take a transcript and reduce it to key points than it is to write notes during a meeting.
Marat Chukmarov
Some teams in our company do in retrospectives. We use confluence pages with a basic template. Firstly, it helps to clarify and bring to the surface any noticed concerns of people, so nobody is hiding their pain. Secondly, it helps to plan to do something with the first point. And lastly, we're cheering guys, who've done well, like 'Alexey is cool' right in the meeting notes. Of course, there's a lot of things that go from one retro to another( 'still need a QA', ' need an Analyst'), but that's how we're doing it now. I hope it helps.
Al
More of my team is working remotely, and we have a culture of transparency so you can pretty much join any meeting you want in the company. We have a shared calendar for the entire company and big events like weekly kickoffs and product demos are on this calendar. We are big on taking detailed meeting notes, decisions made, and how the team built consensus around the decision. This is really important for remote workers like myself to see the thought process going into a decision. Biased here, but we do all of our note taking in @coda_hq . Since notes are captured in a table which have columns for "tags" such as type of meeting, meeting owner, and date, we can reference those notes at any point in the future.
Ksenia
@coda_hq thanks for sharing! What an amazing culture for the remote team, transparency is the key. Are you part of the Code team? What are the benefits of it compared to Notion?
Al
@coda_hq @ksenia_svechnikova Yes I'm part of the team. Coda is a little different from Notion in that the tables really give you a lot of power and flexibility for how your data is calculated and displayed.