Poor audio, background noise, overlapping speakers and unclear speech are familiar problems when taking minutes. Online meetings have added unreliable connections, variable microphones and automated transcripts to the list.
Sometimes the problem is obvious at the time. On other occasions, you only discover it when writing up your notes or listening back to a recording and realise you can’t confidently establish what somebody said.
There isn’t a magic solution. The important thing is knowing what you can reasonably establish, whether the missing information actually matters, and when you need to stop trying to fill in the gaps.
Mark it and move on
If you miss something during a meeting, don’t spend the next few minutes trying to reconstruct it in your head. You risk missing the discussion that’s happening while you’re still thinking about the one that’s just finished.
It helps to develop a simple way of marking anything you need to revisit. That could be CHECK, ??, a highlight or whatever works with your own note-taking system.
If a meeting is being recorded, make a note of the approximate time as well. Finding the right place in a two-hour recording is considerably easier when you know roughly where to look.
You can then continue following the meeting and deal with the uncertainty afterwards.
Does the missing information actually matter?
Minutes aren’t normally intended to reproduce every word spoken. Missing part of a discussion doesn’t automatically mean there’s a hole in the minutes.
You might, for example, miss a sentence during a lengthy discussion but have no doubt that the eventual decision was to approve a revised policy from 1 October. If the missing sentence doesn’t affect the decision, the reasoning behind it or anything else that needs to be recorded, recovering those particular words may serve no useful purpose.
A single unclear word can sometimes make a substantial difference, though. There is an obvious difference between someone saying “I can approve that” and “I can’t approve that”.
So rather than concentrating solely on recovering every missing word, consider whether what you missed could materially change the record. If it could, that’s when it deserves further attention.
Give yourself some context beforehand
A little preparation can make a surprising difference when people are difficult to understand.
If they’re available, have the agenda, attendee list and relevant papers to hand. Names, job titles, acronyms, project names and specialist terminology become much easier to recognise when you’ve seen them beforehand.
This can be particularly useful when you’re taking minutes for an unfamiliar group. If somebody refers to a project, organisation or technical term you haven’t encountered before, you’ve got something reliable to check against rather than trying to guess the spelling from what you heard.
The same applies to names. An attendee list can save a lot of time trying to work out whether somebody said Davies, Davis or something else entirely.
Try the straightforward fixes
When working from a recording, headphones are worth trying before concluding that something is unintelligible. Speech that’s difficult to make out through laptop speakers can sometimes become much clearer.
Listen to the section immediately before and after the unclear part as well. The surrounding discussion may provide enough context to establish what happened, even if you still can’t make out every word.
A small change in playback speed can sometimes help, particularly with a fast speaker, although slowing speech too much can have the opposite effect.
With online meetings, remember that the problem may not be the speaker. Background noise, poor microphones, distance from the microphone, connection problems and several people speaking at once can all make speech difficult to follow. Microsoft also identifies background noise, microphone distance and simultaneous speakers as factors that can affect the accuracy of Teams captions.
None of these is guaranteed to solve the problem. Sometimes repeated listening simply produces repeated uncertainty.
Use other information to check, not to guess
Depending on the meeting, you may have several sources available when something isn’t clear. Your contemporaneous notes, meeting papers, an authorised recording, a transcript and other supporting documents can all help.
They aren’t necessarily equally reliable, and they don’t all prove the same thing.
Suppose you can’t hear part of an exchange, but the next speaker says, “That’s agreed then. We’ll start on Monday.” That provides useful evidence about the outcome of the discussion. It doesn’t necessarily tell you the precise words spoken immediately beforehand.
That’s an important distinction. Context can help you establish what happened without giving you licence to reconstruct words you didn’t actually hear.
If the unclear point is important and can’t be resolved from the material available, clarification from the chair or another appropriate participant may be the better option.
Don’t assume the transcript heard it correctly
Automated transcripts can be extremely useful when writing minutes. They can help you find a particular discussion, check terminology and revisit something that passed too quickly to capture properly at the time.
They can also be wrong.
Microsoft warns that AI-generated meeting content may contain inaccurate information or omit important information and recommends checking it against source material.
There’s a particular risk here for minute takers. An obvious gap in a recording tells you there’s something you haven’t established. An automated transcript can instead produce a perfectly plausible sentence that isn’t what the person said.
Treat the transcript as another useful source rather than an authoritative record. If it conflicts with your notes, your recollection or the surrounding discussion, that’s a reason to check rather than automatically accepting one version.
Take care when tidying spoken language
Part of producing readable minutes is turning spoken conversation into clear written language. People hesitate, repeat themselves, abandon sentences and change direction halfway through a thought. Recording all of that would usually make the minutes less useful rather than more accurate.
There is a difference, though, between tidying somebody’s language and changing what they meant.
If somebody says, “I could probably have that ready by Friday”, turning that into “Action: Report to be completed by Friday” has potentially created a firm commitment that wasn’t actually made.
Qualifications, uncertainty and disagreement can all be lost in the same way if spoken language is polished too enthusiastically.
There will also be occasions when somebody’s actual wording is significant. If you decide that a direct quotation is necessary, you need to be confident that you’re quoting what was actually said. Quotation marks aren’t a solution to uncertainty. They make a stronger claim about the accuracy of the words recorded.
Ask when asking is appropriate
Sometimes clarification is the simplest answer.
During a meeting it may be perfectly reasonable to ask somebody to repeat or clarify a point. In other circumstances, interrupting the discussion may be inappropriate or simply impractical.
The same applies afterwards. If an unclear point is material to the record, it may be appropriate to raise it with the chair or another relevant person rather than trying to resolve it yourself.
Professional guidance from the Chartered Governance Institute recognises both the judgement involved in minute taking and the need to seek clarification where necessary.
Asking for clarification still requires some care. Asking someone what was decided is not necessarily the same as asking them to remember the exact words they used several days earlier. What you need to establish should determine what you ask.
Know when you’ve reached the limit
It’s very easy to spend far too long on a few seconds of bad audio.
You’ve listened repeatedly. You’ve tried headphones. You’ve checked the transcript and your notes. You still aren’t certain.
At some point, another replay isn’t going to make the information more reliable.
If the unclear material isn’t relevant to the minutes, there may be no reason to pursue it further. If it is material, the question becomes how it can appropriately be verified.
The answer will depend on the type of meeting and the organisation involved. A significant uncertainty might be referred to the chair, clarified with those involved or picked up through the organisation’s process for reviewing and approving draft minutes.
What matters is that uncertainty isn’t quietly turned into certainty simply because the minutes need to be finished.
Getting the record right
Good minutes don’t require a perfect meeting or a perfect recording. They do require judgement about what matters, what can be established reliably and what needs further checking.
Most unclear speech will turn out to be unimportant, recoverable or understandable from the wider discussion. Occasionally it won’t.
When that happens, recover what you reasonably can, verify anything material and, if you genuinely don’t know what was said, don’t guess.
