Tips for taking meeting minutes at work with hearing aids

[PricklyPear13]

Looking a bit of advice 😬 Currently work for the NHS as a secretary. There are 2 of us in the office. We have recently been asked to start taking minutes of informal meetings. I was off for a while sick and the other person has been taking the minutes for the last while, their minutes are very detailed! My issue is I wear hearing aids and my anxiety is through the roof worrying about missing something and my minutes not being as detailed, my manager is obviously aware that I wear hearing aids but has said that apparently it is in our job description that we take minutes. Does anyone have any good ways for minute taking, or any tips? Sorry for the long winded post 🙈

Can you set up as a ms teams meeting and that transcribes for you. Your manager sounds like a moron.

Surely there is an app which you can use to record and transcribe the meeting?
I know there is for Teams calls as someone has set it up for one of the regular calls I have to join

that means nothing is lost and saves you time in typing up - you just need to edit

Minutes don’t have to be verbatim. A short summary and the decision. Talk to the chair and ask them to clarify each decision before they move to the next item (chairs quite often do this). If the meeting is on Teams they can be transcribed.

Record the meeting.
Touch up the minutes afterwards. Ideally have teams running so Teams does it for you. I realise the microphone pickup may not be good enough- can you experiment?

And there will be a reasonable adjustment for this. We just need to work out what it is. The phrase ‘reasonable adjustment’ will remind the boss that job description or not, it’s not a sink or swim situation.

I use google meet with transcription turned on and then use the automated meeting minute thing it produces. It's also very useful because it live captions so it's a reasonable adjustment in general.

You can just have your laptop open with the meet open with just you in it.

If you’re planning to record/transcribe the meeting, which is a sensible approach, make sure you check your employer’s policies and that you inform everyone in the meeting that you are recording it for the purposes of note taking (and delete the recording after)

Maybe a reasonable adjustment would be that you don’t take the minutes and they use AI or colleagues. Otherwise, there are likely to be better hearing aids your employer could pay for to support this aspect of your role.

My advice is set something down clearly in terms of adjustments.

I find 80% of meetings fine as I use context and rooms are quiet/ people turn take , but then it’s a problem when I hit a meeting with significant difficulties. If a male colleague with a beard and low voice attends I’m literally just left staring at them without a clue. People don’t get how sometimes I get by then other times I can’t, so me consistent.

Google meet captions are useful. Teams will record and do a transcript. Google can also do transcripts you can tidy up. Also, be firm with needing cameras on if online- that’s easy to be stressful. Say you need to see faces, don’t wait until the meeting where you suddenly can’t access it. Tricky meetings are where the problem arises, when people talk at the same time or run off at speed, also the time when people have less patience!

Also, consider if ‘deaf’ or hearing impaired is best to say. If you say ‘hi’ everyone is ‘oooo, me too’ and they don’t get it. Calmly start meetings with ‘I’m deaf, I’m using hearing aids and I need xxx and yyy’.

Thanks everyone ☺️ I don't think we are allowed to record meetings to be honest, which would have been ideal 😕 I don't particularly want to go down the OH route and say I can't take meetings due to my 'disability' as feel it might make things awkward between myself and my other colleague 🥴 Unfortunately there are a few Dr's who are softly spoken, they are all aware of my hearing difficulty and don't want to keep having to bring it up, i'm just so anxious about it all 😥

@PricklyPear13 - do question them on whether you can record the meetings in order to complete the minutes - as long as you then delete the recording?
or use an AI app to transcribe the meeting for you to then edit

yes in the “olden days” tape recording a meeting would be questioned, but we have moved on from there - even if you had perfect hearing, using AI in this way is simply more efficient use of time for you (& your colleagues too)

You can put a transcript of a teams meeting into AI copilot or ChatGPT and ask it to produce minutes and actions. It does it in seconds you need to do a quick proof read but very time saving.

Surely if they're Dr's they'll have a good level of understanding if disability? They need to help you out here OP. There's a type of mic you can put on the table that will feed into your hearing aids. Google Rnid.
Good luck!

Forgot to say I’m a hearing aid user and got copilot full as a reasonable adjustment after a 10min phone assessment with Ocu Health as I knew how it could help (DH just uses AI for all sorts in his job) and my organisation wouldn’t give full access without a extra hoop to jump through but even without the full version the free version does minutes from transcripts. I work for an organisation that handles official sensitive data so we use a “closed” AI system for the organisation.

You're not saying you can't or won't take the minutes, so I don't understand why it would cause difficulties with your colleague. You're just saying that in order to take them reliably you need to have certain things in place.

For some reason it seems impossible for most people who hear normally to imagine what hearing loss is like and to understand what they need to do for you to be able to hear them. Even when they're making the effort, they occasonally mumble/turn away/speak over someone else. This is going to happen much more in meetings when they're focussing on making their point, not on communicating with you. It isn't in your power to fix this all by yourself. You need HR on your side and whatever technology is appropriate.

Maybe start by asking your audiologist whether they can suggest any kit that's designed to work with your aids, then you'll have something to suggest to HR. And I agree with a pp who said that minutes don't necessarily have to be verbatim. Unless it's a court type situaton where every word matters, most people would prefer a concise summary to pages of waffle and repetition.

There are quite a lot of AI note taking tools available which do a decent job nowadays, which don’t record the meeting.

If your colleague’s notes are very detailed, I’d start by asking whether they’re already using one - the notes tend to come out more detailed from the ai programs than a person would do.

Most online meeting packages (zoom, teams, google etc) have these so start by trying out what you already have.