I quit my job because my boss asked me to take meeting notes.
This is one of the craziest stories from my user interviews. Last week, I was talking to one of our users to get feedback on our idea & product.
She was a UI/UX designer at a well-known start-up. She joined the start-up 8 months back.
She said, “I was the most junior member of my team, so my manager asked me to take notes of our daily catch-up meetings and share notes with others”.
Initially, she kind of enjoyed taking notes but after a couple of months, she felt undervalued.
She mentioned, “It was like I’m not the part of team discussion, couldn’t share my ideas or views since I was busy taking notes.”
One day she confronted her manager and shared her views. His manager said I used to take notes in my early days too. What’s an issue?
She said, “I couldn’t take it anymore and started applying to other companies”. Last month she joined another start-up.
Luckily, an intern takes notes for everyone here. She said, “I shared Instaminutes with him as soon as I got to know about it. I don’t want him to face the same situation as I did.”
To be honest, I didn’t know that we are helping people to this extent with Instaminutes.
Please like and share if you think a person should be given the chance to work as per their area of interest, not something they don’t like doing, e.g., taking meeting notes.
Please share your story in a comment if you faced any similar situation.
I have 4 years of experience but still I take meeting notes. I don't think that's an issue either. Yeah, having a tool that does that automatically seems interesting. Would love to check it out.
Can you please share your app link?
Some things that work better IMHO are:
If I had to take notes at every meeting I'd personally feel a little weirded out. Like why is that my duty?
I've always wondered why more tech companies don't have a secretary or someone to help with this. I think it would help teams be more effective.
There's definitely bad ways to go about it (I've heard that women being implicitly expected to take notes because it's a "woman's job" is still a big problem), but I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that being asked to take notes in and of itself is problematic. Like, having meeting notes helps everyone, and someone has to take them, so...
Nothing wrong with taking meeting notes. We missed out on doing them for a while so I used to self-volunteer to take notes because I found it helpful (team did too). Then sometimes it would be whoever was running the meeting would handle note-taking.
This is the only problematic part about the story. Person made a small grievance about feeling left out and the manager pretty much invalidated the perspective. Alternative is splitting the responsibility, which doesn't make it like "you, the low status person, will take notes."
If it's that important, why not rotate the job around meeting participants?
Yeah, I agree, that'd definitely be better than always making the same person take notes.
Notes are important to recall the discussions in past. Having a tool to manage all the notes at one place and able to search through it easily would be helpful. Does Instaminutes do the same?