Here are a few more of the questions – and our outline answers – following our recent webinar on Handling Workplace Investigations.
Does the notetaking at investigation meetings need to be verbatim?
No. There is no requirement for meeting notes to be a verbatim record of everything that has been said – not only can this make any meeting notes incredibly long and tedious, but often it can mean you lose the key points made amongst all the other chatter that has been captured. The meeting notes should seek to provide a comprehensive summary of what has been said, capturing the key points. You can put particularly telling choices of words or phrases in quotation marks if the exact terms of the evidence are seen as important in order to show that that was what was actually said, not your summary or paraphrasing of it.
If a meeting takes place virtually, do you recommend using the transcribe function to help with note-taking?
We would recommend caution before adopting this approach. Although such technology can make things simpler and it can potentially save you having to arrange for a separate note-taker to be present, in our experience it is still not 100% accurate. It also does still mean that you end up with reams of notes and it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees when it comes to the key points that were discussed. See our previous blog for a fuller discussion of the issues to consider when using voice recognition technology to take notes of meetings. Whether...
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