Free Guide: Construct a Knowledge-Base From Your Meetings
This guide will help you transform your regular, everyday meetings into powerful, actionable data. Beyond the cost of a Microsoft 365 subscription, every step of this guide is free.
By capturing and organizing data from your meetings, you’re not only improving communication and accountability—you’re laying the groundwork for future organizational transformation. The more data your business has on itself, the easier it becomes to implement AI-driven solutions that can streamline processes, predict trends, and drive smarter decision-making across the board.
There are plenty of AI summary tools out there, but this is an easy, cost effective method to begin using new technology to enhance your organization.
Requirements
A Microsoft 365 subscription
MS Word installed on your PC
An OpenAI account to use ChatGPT (optional)
Convert your Meetings into Data
Learn how to capture and convert meetings into valuable data. By following these steps, you’ll create detailed summaries that enhance communication, accountability, and decision-making within your organization.
Bring your computer to your meeting.
Create a word document.
Home → Dictate → Transcribe → Start Recording. Under the “Home” tab, find the “Dictate” option to the far right of the screen. Click the arrow under “Dictate” to select “Transcribe”. A pop-up window will appear on the right. Choose your language and click “Start Recording”.
Conduct your meeting. The text will not show on the document until you click “Stop Recording”.
Click “Add to document” when your meeting ends. The audio file and transcript will be displayed on the word document.
Open your browser and navigate to ChatGPT.
Paste the following prompt into ChatGPT:
“Please analyze the following [Meeting Type] transcript and provide a detailed summary.
The summary should include the following:
Tone of the Meeting: Describe the overall mood and atmosphere during the meeting. Was it collaborative, tense, productive, casual, etc.?
Key Takeaways: Identify the most important points discussed during the meeting. What were the main themes or topics covered?
Action Items: List all the action items that were agreed upon, including who is responsible for each and any deadlines mentioned.
Decisions Made: Highlight any decisions or agreements that were reached during the meeting. Include the rationale behind these decisions if discussed.
Concerns or Challenges: Note any concerns, challenges, or issues that were raised during the meeting, along with any proposed solutions or next steps.
Opportunities: Identify any potential opportunities that were discussed or hinted at during the meeting, whether for improvement, growth, or new initiatives.
Additional Notes: Include any other relevant information that could help in understanding the full context and outcomes of the meeting.”
Copy and paste the meeting transcript from the Word document under the prompt in ChatGPT.
Send the prompt to ChatGPT.
Copy the response from ChatGPT and paste it back into your meeting notes under a new header titled “Summary”, or into a new document within the same folder.
Email or share the meeting summary with the relevant participants for future reference.
Implement a Plan
Now that you’ve structured a plan for capturing and summarizing your meeting data, it’s crucial to implement this plan effectively to ensure consistency and maximize its benefits within your organization. Here’s how you can successfully put your plan into action:
Set up a Clear Data Organization Structure
Create a Centralized Folder System: Start by setting up a new folder on your personal or network drive to organize all your meeting data. This will ensure that your meeting notes and summaries are easy to find and reference in the future.
Folder Hierarchy: The folder hierarchy should follow a clear and consistent structure, such as:
Meetings/
|——— One-on-Ones/
|—————— 20240830/
|————————— Manager Name Report Name Raw Text.docx
|————————— Manager Name Report Name Meeting Summary.docx
|——— Board Meetings/
|—————— 20240831/
|————————— Monthly Board Meeting Raw Text.docx
|————————— Monthly Board Meeting Meeting Summary.docx
Communicate the Purpose and Benefits
Transparency is Key: Before implementing the meeting notes plan, it’s important to communicate the purpose and benefits to all participants. The goal is not to spy on employees, but to foster accountability and improve communication.
Two-Way Accountability: Recording the meetings and generating summaries will enable two-way accountability between managers and employees. This ensures everyone is on the same page, action items are followed through, and key decisions are documented for future reference.
Privacy Concerns: Word has a “Pause” button (just click the microphone) within its transcription feature. This allows users to exclude sensitive information from being recorded. This ensures personal or confidential topics can be discussed without being documented.
Establish a Consistent Process
Standardize Meeting Procedures: Define a standardized process for each major type of meeting. This includes how meetings are recorded, the prompts being used to create summaries, and where these summaries are stored. Consistency will make it easier for everyone to follow the process and maintain organized records.
Train your Team: Provide training or resources to ensure that all participants understand how to use the recording and transcription features in Microsoft Word, as well as how to generate summaries using ChatGPT. This will help minimize eros and ensure the process is being followed correctly.
Regular Review and Feedback: Schedule regular check-ins to review how the process is working and gather feedback from your team. Adjust this process as needed to address any challenges or improve efficiency.
Encourage Buy-In and Participation
Lead by Example: Managers should consistently use the meeting notes plans in their own meetings. When team members see leadership committed to the process, they are more likely to follow suit.
Highlight Success Stories: Share examples of how the meeting notes plan has led to better decision-making, improved accountability, or enhanced team communication. Success stories can motivate others to fully embrace the process.
Provide Incentives: Offer incentives for teams or individuals who consistently follow the meeting notes plan and demonstrate its benefits. This could be as simple as recognition in team meetings or more formal rewards.
Use your Data
Now that you have structured a framework for capturing and summarizing your meeting data within your team, it’s essential to leverage this information effectively to drive ongoing improvement. Here’s how you can make the most of your new summaries and data:
Track progress and accountability
Monitor Action Items: Regularly review action items from your meeting summaries to ensure they are being followed up on and completed. This will help maintain accountability within your team and ensure that progress is being made.
Evaluate Decisions: Use the documented decisions from past meetings to assess their effectiveness over time. This allows you to learn from what worked well and what didn’t, guiding better decision-making in future meetings.
Enhancing Team Communication
Improve Meeting Effectiveness: Analyze the tone and key takeaways from your meetings to identify areas where communication can be improved. If certain meetings tend to be tense or unproductive, you can address these issues directly and have data to fall back on.
Aligning Goals: Use the meeting summaries to ensure that everyone on your team is aligned with the organization’s goals and objectives. Regularly reference these summaries to keep everyone on the same page. Use the simple existence of meeting summaries as a record to make sure recurring meetings are happening when they should.
Identify Trends and Opportunities
Spotting Patterns: Over time, meeting data will reveal patterns in team performance, morale, and challenges. By analyzing these trends, you can proactively address issues before they become significant problems.
Recognizing Successes: Use your data to highlight and celebrate successes within the team. This will boost morale and encourage continued high performance.
Strategic Planning and Forecasting
Informed Decision Making: Incorporate insights from your meeting summaries into your strategic planning processes. Data-driven decision making will help you set realistic goals and develop strategies that are grounded in real-world insights.
Forecasting Challenges: Use historical meeting data to anticipate potential challenges and prepare solutions in advance.
Continuous Learning and Development
Personal Development: Use feedback and insights from meetings to guide managers and team members personal development plans. Focus on areas of improvement and set achievable goals.
Managerial Coaching: Use the summaries to provide targeted coaching to managers, helping them improve their leadership skills and effectiveness in running meetings.
Build your Knowledge Base
Implementing a structured process for capturing and summarizing your meeting data is not just a step toward better organization—it’s a transformational shift that can profoundly impact your company’s future. In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, AI and machine learning are becoming indispensable tools for gaining insights, automating processes, and driving innovation. However, these technologies thrive on data—the more data you have, the more powerful and accurate your AI-driven insights can be.
By consistently capturing detailed meeting summaries and organizing them into a comprehensive knowledge base, you’re creating a valuable asset that can unlock new opportunities as AI technologies continue to advance. This repository of data will allow your organization to apply AI in new and unique ways. A few ideas I have about this would be:
Generate training materials for onboarding a new employee custom to your organization.
Run quick searches to get information usually hidden in documents or notes deep within a siloed department’s network drive.
Analyze overall organizational health over long time horizons, ie. asking an LLM:
“Over the last 2 years, what were the three biggest challenges we encountered in the engineering department?”
“What was the most valuable discovery we made about our customers in the last month?”
As AI continues to evolve, having a well-structured, extensive dataset will give your organization a significant competitive edge. It will enable you to implement AI solutions more effectively, stay ahead of industry trends, and continuously adapt to new challenges and opportunities. In essence, building this knowledge base is an investment in your company’s future, ensuring you’re well-prepared to harness the full potential of AI as it becomes increasingly integral to business success.
More Information
For more information, tips, and other resources, click here.
Morph Meetings by Morph Data Strategies is a tool that automates the process described above, plus much more. If you are interested, create a free account here.
