Notes that are worth the ten minutes
A transcript is not a record. The useful artefact is much shorter and takes deliberate effort to produce.
In a distributed team, whatever is not written did not happen for anyone who was not there — which, given time zones, is a meaningful share of the people affected. For broader context on online meetings and collaboration, Microsoft Teams is a useful reference.
The usual response is a long set of notes that nobody reads, which is the same outcome as no notes with more effort expended.
Write the decisions, not the discussion
The valuable content is small: what was decided, what was explicitly not decided, who owns what by when, and anything that changed from the pre-read. For a practical software-side reference on how self-reporting can shape meeting records, this resource adds useful detail.
The discussion itself is rarely worth recording. Where it matters — a substantive objection, a trade-off that was weighed — it belongs in the decision record rather than in the meeting notes.
Decided. Not decided. Actions with owners and dates. If a note does not fit under one of those, it probably does not need to be written.
Assign the note-taker before the meeting
Notes taken by whoever remembers afterwards are written from memory and reflect one person's reading. Assigning it in advance — and rotating it — produces better notes and spreads a task that otherwise lands on the same person, frequently the most junior or the only woman in the room.
Post within the hour
Notes that arrive two days later have already been overtaken. The people who missed the meeting have been guessing in the meantime, and the actions have either happened or not.
Within the hour, while it is fresh, in the channel where the work lives. The speed matters more than the polish.
Recordings are not a substitute
Recording a call and posting the link is a common practice and does not solve the problem. Nobody watches a fifty-minute recording to find out what was decided.
A recording is a useful archive for the rare occasion when the exact wording matters. It is not a record, and treating it as one means the team has no accessible decisions at all.
Link them from where the work is
Notes filed in a folder of meeting notes are notes nobody will find. The decision belongs where the work happens: attached to the project, the ticket, the document it concerns.
The organising principle is that a person arriving at a piece of work should find its history there, rather than having to know which meeting to look up.