How To Run An Effective Board Meeting
Running a board meeting is no easy feat. There’s a lot that goes into it in terms of preparation to ensure that no point is left untouched and every pertinent matter is discussed. The pressure you may feel during a board meeting likely has to do with the fact that you aren’t addressing just any group of employees. Rather, the attendees are members of the board or the top executives of the company. Naturally, you’d want to either meet or exceed their expectations.
An effective board meeting is one where all important matters are covered by the time the session ends. Each of the attendees must also bring the right contributions to the table the moment the discussion commences. That way, the time spent for the meeting isn’t wasted.
Read on to discover simple but failproof strategies on how to conduct an effective board meeting.
Use Meeting Management Software Or Tools
Technology is shaping the way that companies operate nowadays. It affects a lot of areas in business, and those include your board meetings.
Among the many technological advancements out there available to you, one that you need to have is board meeting agenda. As its name implies, this is a tool or platform that can help you in handling meetings. It’s equipped with features that enable better meeting coordination and allow you to send notices, documents, and other updates surrounding the meeting. With this software, everyone who attends the board meeting can be on the same page.
If you need more convincing, here are other good reasons to install and use meeting management tools:
- They automate pre-meeting activities and announcements.
- They’re available for both desktop and online access.
- They provide a seamless way to send important files to meeting attendees.
- They’re equipped with metering tools that may come in handy for decision-making purposes.
- They allow for automatic updates regarding meeting agenda, minutes, and tasks or reminders for the attendees.
Set A Quorum
Board meetings are usually called for if major decisions about the company need to be made. Usually, those decisions are to be decided upon by members of the board or upper management. This is the reason one of the necessary factors to establish an effective board meeting is reaching a quorum.
Each company’s by-laws will have its own standards as to what quorum for them means. In the absence of this, a quorum simply refers to the majority of the required attendees, so it’s half of the total number plus one. If a quorum isn’t achieved, then major decisions can’t be voted upon, and the voice of the majority won’t be heard.
For you to determine beforehand whether or not your meeting has a quorum, it’s important to have an RSVP sent together with the meeting invite or notice. That way, if a quorum isn’t met, you can opt to postpone the meeting to a later date.
Have The Agenda Approved
Before the board meeting goes into full swing, every attendee has to go through and approve the set agenda. This step is a must in order to have a check-and-balance system in place.
If there are crucial matters that have to be discussed but aren’t included in the agenda for one reason or another, someone should bring them up as soon as possible. By doing so, the time and resources spent for the board meeting are maximized since every necessary thing will be attended to before the meeting is adjourned.
Call The Roll
Prior to the start of the board meeting, a board secretary has to be appointed if your company currently doesn’t have one. Among all the other tasks that person has to do, one of the most important is calling the roll. This simply means checking the attendance of those who confirmed their participation.
Taking the roll is a necessary step, especially if there are issues that need to be addressed or discussed by a particular board member or attendee. You wouldn’t want to start or proceed with the meeting if that individual isn’t present yet.
Conclusion
Chairperson or not, once you’re part of the top management of a corporation, you may be asked to host or run a board meeting at some point. This task isn’t one for you to take lightly. Remember that you’re dealing with members of the board with busy schedules. The last thing you want is for the meeting to lack structure, be unproductive, and, most of all, be unsuccessful.
Company resources are spent in conducting a board meeting, so you’ll want to make the most of those expenses. There’s always room to learn and improve, and you can’t go wrong with applying the guide above in order to conduct an effective board meeting.
