Every month, I have to record the minutes for a particular meeting. I’ve never had any complaints with the quality of the job that I do.
Last month, I went on vacation, so I asked a co-worker in my department if she wouldn’t mind doing the minutes for me. She and I are pretty good friends, and she agreed.
Now this co-worker and friend of mine are used to busting each other’s chops all the time. We have a good time with it and it lightens our day. When she finished the minutes, she said, “They’re done. And that’s how you do minutes, not your way.”
So I go back to look and man, did she overdo it. She essentially wrote down every word of what was said in the meeting. She even cross-referenced with minutes from previous meetings. She hasn’t ever sat in this particular meeting before, so I don’t understand how she caught it all. It’s apparent that she spent hours doing these minutes, when it should’ve taken 60 minutes at the most.
I’ll admit that recording minutes isn’t one of my stronger skills, but boy, am I humiliated. And what made it worse was what she said beforehand. “That’s how you do minutes, not your way.”
Do I have a right to be angry at this woman? She and I aren’t vying for the same job, nor are we otherwise competitive. She has said several times over that she’s overqualified for her job. She’s is overqualified, but I think she’s making a big show of it and making me look bad in the process.
Possibly, but it’s not productive to get angry at her. Use it as a learning experience, find out if others see her style of minutes as being more valuable, and if so, modify your technique to do things that way. You can always get better at your job, that’s what friendly competition is all about. Look on this as a challenge.
I agree that minutes should not reflect every comment, and in fact, should often not do so. That’s why the phrase “a lengthy discussion ensued” was born! Decisions- yes, verbiage, no.
I don’t think you should be angry. I think you should ask her how much time she spent on those minutes and what her approach was – especially if she didn’t spend much more than an hour on them. I’m impressed with the cross-referencing to previous meetings. That’s awesome. I would pick her brain for tips and advice and try to learn it her way. Channel your irritation into something that’s more productive and look at this as a learning opportunity.
I don’t think it would be very productive to be mad at her, though she was rude. SHE thinks she did the minutes better than you do, but to me it sounds like she went a bit overboard - cross referencing with past minutes? That’s not really the point - minutes are for what happened at THIS meeting.
And there isn’t one single correct way to do minutes, anyway. I do minutes for several different meetings where I work, and they’re all done differently depending on the structure of the meeting & what the chairs of committees want to see. If I gave my boss minutes with every word recorded for any meeting, she’d cross it out & give it back to me.
If, as you say, you guys are used to good-natured bashing, take it in the spirit it was intended - as a ribbing. Give it back to her: “OK, you get to do this from now on!” I really don’t see any call to get angry.
The key question to get answered is: is she right? That is, are her minutes better than yours? Some meetings would benefit from this kind of painstaking detail. Others would not. I sit on the board of a non-profit corporation and our board meetings run long because we have some board members that like to hear themselves talk and some that are petrified about doing anything without essentially unanimous support. If the minutes from those meetings were verbatim, we’d publish a small novel every month.
Once the issue of “what does THIS group need” is resolved, you can then either humbly swallow your pride and learn how to construct minutes the right way, or loftily thank her for her painstaking work but let her know that really, she didn’t need to go through that much work for this group, since a quick summary of reports made and decisions approved are all that the group is looking for.
Yah, I was wondering about that after I posted. What sort of meeting requires verbatim minutes? I work in academia and there’s pretty well NO meeting that needs that much detail.
I am going to chime in here for my husband. He’s ALWAYS grousing about how much time he spends in meetings, and says that he could do at least half again as much work if he didn’t have to go to the various meetings each day. He’ll say that SOME meetings are productive, but most of them are held because they’ve always done things that way.
That’s the problem with getting yourself noticed as an excellent worker with many skills - I try not to do that any longer.
I think PunditLisa is right - they’re likely to just be filed. My comment to her would probably be something along the lines of, "Don’t let your boss find out you have so many free hours in your day. "
Why are you pissed at anyone but yourself? It’s not her fault you suck at minutes.
As said, the purpose of taking minutes is generally not to transcribe the entire meeting. It’s to aid in organizing the results of the discussion and subsequent actions to be taken.
If you are taking minutes, presumably there is also an agenda that goes out prior to the meeting. The topics in the agenda will typically form the framework for your meeting. Minutes will typically be used to record what actions were taken or discussed, the current status of each of the topics discussed and any issues or next steps to be taken.
In fact, you should organize your minutes something like this:
-Topic
–Key Points Discussed
–Accomplishments
–Outstanding Items (as in ‘overdue’, not ‘awesome’)
–Issues Raised
–Next Steps (also include who owns this steps and due dates for completion)
IOW, you don’t need to transcribe a page of everything that was said when the outcome is “Bob cancelled Project X and the team agreed.”
And it shouldn’t take hours to do. This stuff should be recorded during the meeting and it should take about 20 minutes to organize and put in a Word template afterwards.
I’d be bemused rather than angry. As you’ve said, they’ve been way over-produced and she’s clearly spent more time on it than necessary. It sounds like she’s bored in her job and thought it would be an interesting activity to do, rather than a kick in the face to you.
Like others, I’d call that a transcript of the meeting, not minutes. I serve on several boards and other organizations and I have never seen one in which the minutes consisted of a transcript rather than a summary of the discussion. IMO, that’s exactly how NOT to do minutes: it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Unless you get feedback from others that they would prefer to see this kind of detail rather than summaries, I wouldn’t change the way you do minutes. And if you do get feedback that your way is better, don’t be mad at your co-worker, but make sure she knows what others said about it.
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