What is a virtual board meeting? Virtual board meetings are meetings held by video or telephone where is it not possible for all participants, primarily, all directors, to be together physically.
In today’s climate, there are many things that might be challenging your company but holding an effective board meeting shouldn’t be one of them. It’s never going to be the same as being in a room together, in terms of flow and ease of discussion, and phone and video conference call facilities can cause a variety of technical issues depending on your Internet or phone coverage at home. Below, we’ve listed our top tips to help you get the most out of your virtual board meetings:
- Ensure a strong and experienced Chair or Secretary is appointed to take the roll, run the meeting and take the Board through the agenda, all of which can be more challenging in a virtual meeting environment;
- When starting the meeting, go through the exercise to enquire and ensure that everyone can hear everyone else clearly;
- Video is the more ideal medium through which to run a board meeting for discussions and decisions, other than administrative items, as it’s the best way for all meeting participants to feel engaged, see physical reactions to comments and pick up visible social cues. Ensuring that everyone has their say and that directors can adequately challenge company executives is more easily facilitated;
- It should be requested by the Chair or Secretary, at the outset, that anyone not speaking should put themselves on mute;
- As participants will likely be attending from home, choose a room with minimal background noise so, that if you’re speaking there is minimal disruption to sound quality for all participants;
- If appropriate, record the call, this will assist with the accurate minuting of the meeting. Most conferencing systems now have this facility;
- Use an online board portal platform, so that meeting materials can be put together, and more importantly, distributed securely and efficiently in virtual times, and are available to directors and other meeting participants to view online with their personal login / downloaded to their laptops.
Dominion has vast experience in organising and running efficient and effective virtual board meetings, a service and skill more important now than ever. We use leading board portal software, VirtualBoardroom, to provide this solution for our clients and can accommodate most industry standard telecommunication platforms such as Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
Written by Carol Ann Rotsey, Executive Director, London
Contact us for more information.