Guidance around best practice minute writing usually focuses on quality — in other words, what needs to be done to ensure that meeting minutes meet legal requirements and satisfy directors’ needs. And for good reason: producing minutes that are accurate, take the right tone, and capture an appropriate level of detail is far from easy and requires equal measures of skill, knowledge, and judgement (so much so that we have an entire article dedicated to governance experts’ top tips on the matter).
What most guidance tends to omit, however, is that creating minutes at that level of quality comes at a significant cost. How much exactly will vary between forums and industries, but early findings from our meeting minutes calculator suggest that governance teams spend an average of 10 hours writing up the minutes of an average board or committee meeting, with those from the largest companies pushing past the 17-hour mark.
Multiple company secretaries have also told us that, as a rule of thumb, they spend four hours writing minutes for every hour of meeting time. This isn’t surprising when you consider that the transcript of an hour’s worth of conversation can reach 10,000 words and 20 pages of A4.
Not only does the cost of all this time and effort add up, it also isn’t sustainable. Internally, the number of meetings keeps growing, with our research tools jointly built with the CGIUKI suggesting a 25% increase in committee meetings since 2019. Externally, new expectations from both regulators and stakeholders mean that the remit of governance teams keeps growing too. Meanwhile, budgets aren’t budging. Something’s gotta give.
“Best practice” that can’t be sustained in the long term isn’t best practice at all. So, how do we update our view of what good looks like before the burden becomes just too much to bear? We suggest a two-pronged approach.
First, get some context of the full minutes production process from start to finish rather than evaluating your meeting minutes in a vacuum. Best practice should no longer be about delivering high quality in the final product but about delivering both high quality and an efficient process throughout. Viewed in that light, are your minutes still top of the pack, or do you have a problem on your hands?
If you haven’t already, a good place to start is to use our calculator to work out the cost involved based on the number of forums and the distribution of minutes-related work between junior and senior team members.
Second, once you know the scale of the problem, don’t just tweak your process at the margin. The root of the issue isn’t that, say, you’re not delegating enough of the job to the junior members of your team; rather, it’s that job itself isn’t humanly doable in its current form. What’s needed, then, are new tools that can help produce minutes in a radically different way — and that’s where artificial intelligence comes in.
AI isn’t without its limitations, as we covered in depth in our guide to AI for the board pack. But what it excels at is converting data from one representation to another — be it “image to text”, “text to spreadsheet”, or “French to English”. Why is that relevant? Because that’s precisely the process that underpins minute writing. Decisions made by the board (data) get converted from notes or transcripts (one representation of said data) into proper meeting minutes (another representation of the same data).
One big caveat, however: whilst minutes may fill a significant part of a company secretary’s waking hours, they remain a niche and AI tools aren’t exposed to many best practice examples during their training. Which means that “generic” AIs à la ChatGPT often fall flat when asked to turn transcripts into meeting minutes. In tests we conducted, crucial details went missing; imaginary ones were added; and quality dropped over time, with most AIs losing track of who was saying what once the transcript reached 40,000 words. And that’s before we even mention the security concerns that stem from using publicly available tools that train on the interactions they have with their users.
That’s why we developed our own AI-powered software solution, Minute Writer:
Minute Writer won’t automate your entire process, and we don’t believe it should. But it will speed up the more tedious, repetitive, and labour-intensive parts, so that your governance team can get on with producing minutes that are truly best practice — process included. Simply book a demo to start that change.