How to Create Outstanding Action Items in a Meeting

If you're working remotely, you must be engaging in several meetings per week with your team to determine the course of work and track progress. To ensure your meetings have served their purpose, it's important to conclude them with action items.

So how can you write efficient, easy-to-follow action items? In this article, we're going to discuss how you can create outstanding action items in any meeting.

What are action items in a meeting?

An action item is a specific assignment given to the team members to direct them toward project completion. It's a discrete task used to organize the workflow and help dissect a major project into smaller, manageable tasks in a specific timeframe.

This way, your team knows what to work on every day, week, and month until the project is finished. Action items should be recorded at the end of every meeting in a clear, concise manner and checked off once completed.

What are the advantages of creating action items?

So why should you create action items for your team?

For one, they help to organize a project's workflow by dividing its assignments into smaller actionable items to help team members manage their time more efficiently. Let's find out the main advantages of creating an action items list:

1. Action items conclude the meeting outcomes

In most meetings, important ideas can get lost during the meeting without keeping track of actionable items. Listing concise action items is a great idea to conclude the meeting outcomes for the team's reference.

2. Action items enhance team productivity

When your team has a list of specific tasks to complete within a deadline, they'll more likely achieve those tasks in due time. This will facilitate the workflow and prevent any possible delays in the project, enhancing team productivity.

3. Action items are specifically assigned to each member

Not only will each person know their role in the project, but also the whole team will recognize who's in charge of each task. This makes it easier to discover and push through any bottlenecks that may occur in the process.

And what if you DON'T list action items for your team? Without action items, tracking the progress of each member and foreseeing potential hurdles become much harder.

What are good action items?

A good action item must answer three questions: (1) What does the task entail? (2) Who will work on the task? (3) When should the task be completed?

Answering these three simple questions is key in creating a clear, concise action item. 

How do you write action items?

So what are the best practices in creating action items in a meeting? Let's take a look at a few tips:

1. Describe the action item briefly and clearly in one sentence

The sentence should be long enough to indicate the task's purpose but not too long or wordy.

2. Mention the person responsible for each action item

Each person must understand their role in the action items and the whole team must know who to contact if their work depended on another person's task. You must determine who the best person is for each task to optimize the work process and prevent unnecessary delays.

3. Begin each action item with a verb

The term "action item" indicates performing an action; so make sure to use direct action verbs to provide clear instructions to the team.

4. Be consistent and coherent in listing all action items

Use the same format when writing each item to make it comprehensible and readable.

5. Divide the action items into subcategories

Create subheadings to gather similar tasks under the same umbrella, for example, administration, production, design, and other items. You can also list resources, tools, and methods required to complete each task.

6. Mention the deadline with each action item

People always work better within a specific timeframe. Create a deadline for each task after discussing it with the team member to determine a reasonable due date.

The due date must be written with the date, time in am or pm, and specific time zone. This is especially important with teams working overseas to ensure everyone delivers their task within the same hours.

How do you record action items in a meeting?

Documenting your action items in a specific place is crucial so that your team can easily refer to them during the project. You can list them in the meeting minutes or in a note-taking app to keep track of all action items in a single project.

💡 Pro Tip. With adam.ai, you can schedule your meetings with our built-in booking pages, run the call and capture its content, vote on polls and assign actions on meeting attendees, while having the video call itself on adam.ai built-in video conferencing tool, or integrate with your preferred communication platform like Zoom, Google Meet, or Webex. Use Adam the AI meeting assistant to Instantly get meeting transcript, smartly highlight key content items, and quickly convert them into actionable items.

With adam.ai, your team members can easily locate their assigned action items, individually and collectively, and mark each task as done once completed.

What are action items in a meeting example?

Let's see how you can implement all the aforementioned tips in an example.

From the screenshot below, you can see the action item states: Finalize the product features and pitch documents before our next product meeting. The due date is May 30, the severity of the action item is medium, and the assignee is attached to the task.

This action item example answers the three basic questions of who, what, and when. Use this format to customize your action items in any meeting.

The bottom line

Action items are the logical outcome of any meeting, and without them, your team will lose track of what to work on.

Outlining clear, actionable items in a meeting helps the employees to manage their time better and facilitate the workflow to deliver the project on time.

We hope you can use the tips outlined in this article to guide you while creating action items in your future meetings.

And while there may be multiple meeting management solutions available, here is why adam.ai is the all-in-one meeting management platform you can trust:

• adam.ai is one of Atlassian Ventures' portfolio companies.
• In the meeting management software category on G2, adam.ai has been ranked a leader and a high performer for successive quarters in the past years.
• adam.ai has been included in the Forrester Report in the AI-enabled meeting technology landscape.
• adam.ai is trusted and used by powerful teams and organizations worldwide for all types of critical meetings, like board, committee, project management, and business development meetings.
• And most importantly, adam.ai integrates with your existing workflow, is SOC2 compliant, provides dedicated support and success, and has a free trial option.