Stop Wasting Hours on Pointless Meeting Records – What They Don’t Teach in Business School
Sitting through another pointless management meeting last Thursday, I observed the depressing ritual of talented professionals transformed into expensive documentation servants.
Here’s the harsh truth that most Australian workplaces won’t to face: most minute taking is a total waste of resources that generates the illusion of professional practice while genuinely stopping meaningful work from being completed.
After working with countless of companies across every state, I can tell you that traditional minute taking has become one of the biggest impediments to meaningful meetings.
We’ve transformed talented employees into over qualified recording devices who waste meetings frantically capturing all conversation instead of engaging their expertise.
Let me share the absolutely insane minute taking disaster I’ve encountered.
I was brought in with a technology organisation in Melbourne where they had assigned a qualified team leader to take detailed minutes for each conference.
This person was paid $120,000 per year and had fifteen years of sector expertise. Instead of engaging their valuable expertise to the conversation they were acting as a overpaid secretary.
But here’s the insane reality: the company was at the same time using several distinct automated documentation platforms. They had automated recording systems, digital recording of the whole session, and multiple attendees creating their own comprehensive notes .
The session addressed critical topics about project direction, but the professional best qualified to contribute those decisions was completely occupied on capturing each minor comment instead of contributing strategically.
The combined cost for capturing this single conference was more than $4,000, and literally none of the minutes was ever used for one practical objective.
The absurdity was completely lost on them. They were sacrificing their highest qualified contributor to produce records that nobody would ever review afterwards.
The rise of automated systems was supposed to solve the minute taking challenge, but it’s genuinely made things significantly harder.
We’ve moved from straightforward brief records to elaborate comprehensive information management environments that consume groups of staff to manage.
I’ve worked with companies where staff now waste longer time organising their technological conference records than they invested in the real sessions that were documented.
The cognitive overhead is staggering. People are not participating in decisions more meaningfully – they’re simply managing more digital burden.
This assessment will definitely irritate most of the governance experts reading this, but comprehensive minute taking is frequently a risk management performance that has minimal connection to do with real responsibility.
Most meeting minutes are written to fulfil imagined audit obligations that seldom really exist in the individual circumstances.
I’ve consulted with organisations that spend tens of thousands of dollars on complex record keeping systems because someone years ago told them they must have extensive minutes for compliance reasons.
The result? Significant investments in time and budget for documentation procedures that offer questionable protection while significantly harming operational productivity.
Genuine responsibility comes from actionable commitments, not from comprehensive documentation of every word spoken in a session.
So what does sensible corporate record keeping actually look like?
Apply the proportionality concept to meeting minute taking.
I recommend a simple focused template: Major choices reached, Responsibility assignments with assigned individuals and deadlines, Next actions planned.
Any else is bureaucratic excess that generates absolutely no utility to the organisation or its objectives.
Create a defined system of documentation levels based on actual meeting importance and business requirements.
A informal departmental check in call should require minimal documented minutes. A strategic governance conference that makes major commitments deserves appropriate record keeping.
I’ve worked with businesses that hire dedicated minute takers for important conferences, or rotate the responsibility among administrative team members who can develop professional knowledge while enabling expert people to focus on what they do most effectively.
The cost of specialist minute taking assistance is almost always far less than the economic impact of having expensive people waste their time on documentation work.
Accept that senior people deliver optimal impact when they’re analysing, not when they’re documenting.
If you definitely must have comprehensive conference documentation, employ dedicated support personnel or designate the task to junior staff who can benefit from the experience.
Reserve formal record keeping for meetings where commitments have regulatory significance, where multiple stakeholders need common records, or where multi part action strategies must be managed over extended periods.
The key is ensuring intentional choices about minute taking approaches based on genuine circumstances rather than defaulting to a standard method to each conferences.
The annual expense of dedicated administrative support is almost always much cheaper than the economic loss of having expensive professionals waste their time on clerical tasks.
Deploy conference technology to reduce documentation work, not expand it.
The most practical digital solutions I’ve seen are unobtrusive – they automate the repetitive aspects of documentation without demanding extra complexity from session attendees.
The critical factor is selecting tools that enhance your meeting objectives, not tools that create focuses in themselves.
The aim is technology that facilitates engagement on meaningful conversation while efficiently managing the required documentation.
The objective is technology that enhances focus on valuable discussion while efficiently handling the required administrative requirements.
What I wish each Australian leader understood about productive workplaces:
Good governance comes from actionable decisions and consistent follow up, not from extensive transcripts of conversations.
Perfect documentation of poor meetings is just ineffective documentation – this won’t improve poor meetings into successful ones.
On the other hand, I’ve worked with organisations with elaborate record keeping processes and terrible follow through because they confused documentation instead of actual accountability.
The worth of a session resides in the impact of the commitments established and the implementation that emerge, not in the comprehensiveness of the records produced.
The actual worth of each meeting resides in the impact of the commitments established and the actions that emerge, not in the thoroughness of the documentation generated.
Prioritise your attention on enabling environments for productive decision making, and the record keeping will emerge appropriately.
Invest your energy in creating effective environments for excellent problem solving, and appropriate documentation will follow organically.
After twenty years of helping organisations improve their meeting effectiveness, here’s my conviction:
Record keeping must support results, not become more important than meaningful work.
Minutes should serve action, not control decision making.
The best meetings are the gatherings where all participants concludes with absolute understanding of what was agreed, who is responsible, and when tasks must to be delivered.
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