Do Your Team a Favor: Recap Your Meeting

One of the most frustrating work experiences is when you meet about a project, and later realize that everyone left the meeting with a completely different idea of what was decided.

This can happen in a number of different types of meetings, but I find there can be three times when this miscommunication occurs the most:

1. Brainstorming meetings (early on in a project’s conception)

2. Problem solving meetings

3. Project feedback meetings

Generally, the more complex the topic, the more possible routes your team could take- the higher the chance people will leave the meeting on different pages.

Over the years, I’ve had this experience too many times - enough times that at some point, I decided that I needed to do something about it.

There’s a really obvious, very simple solution. But it didn’t occur to me until I had a call with Apple.

We’re an Apple business customer, so periodically I have a virtual meeting with our Apple Business rep who listens to our technical processes and helps us solve any system problems within our hardware and software configuration (which by the way, is a free service they offer and it’s not a sales call). We usually talk for an hour or two, I’ll explain something that’s not working the way we expect it to, and they work the problem with me. Often, we might consider 3 or 4 possible solutions to these problems.

But here’s what they do after our meeting. They send out an email to everyone on the call and provide a simple “meeting recap.” It goes something like this:

“Today, we discussed these problems with the computer systems at Arrowhead Church:

• Problem 1

• Problem 2

So we decided to try these solutions:

• Option 1

• Option 2

Our next steps are going to be:

• Next step 1

• Next step 2”

That’s the basic format of their meeting recap emails. When I saw that, it seemed so immediately obvious to me that a meeting recap message was the missing piece that could unify everyone after a complex meeting, even if it’s just one-on-one.

It’s really not more complicated than that. It’s a simple practice I can do to help keep our team focused.

These days, after feedback, problem-solving, or brainstorming type meetings, I’ll send out a recap to whomever I met with (even if they took their own notes and even if it was just the two of us). My notes may not be perfect, but at the very least it lets them know, “This is what Jared walked away thinking we decided.” That alone is helpful because any miscommunication can be cleared up much faster.

One more note: I usually tell whoever I’m meeting with that I’m taking notes and will send them after our meeting. I want them to know that it’s a part of my process to help keep myself on track (and likewise, I don’t want to undermine their own intelligence). After a few meetings like this, they get used to this.

So do yourself and your team a favor. Send out a meeting recap after.