Upgrading Your Board Meeting Agendas Through Technology

Organizations of every stripe require regular meetings to discuss, coordinate and resolve business matters and other important issues. This is certainly true for a supervisory board. An agenda serves as an outline or a roadmap to focus the discussion on key issues and ensure that the group makes time for the things that matter. This agenda also communicates the agenda items for board meeting for those who will attend as well as those who won’t, so it’s important to know how to create an agenda for a board meeting and how to make it available to all interested parties.

Creating an Agenda

Your agenda is an outline of items to be covered in the meeting. It’s important to reach a consensus on the board meeting agenda format, which also dictates the priority of each item and the order of discussion. A typical board meeting agenda includes these elements:

• Agenda Items: Includes the topics, updates, and other business to be discussed and documented in a summary or meeting minutes
• Name of organization: Identifies the group conducting the meetings
• Other organizational information: May include addresses, contact information, name of board chairman, and names of other board members or attendees
• Date and time: Provides when the meeting is scheduled as part of an official record
• Location: States where the meeting will be held, including an address and room, or virtual conference details

Structuring Your Items

Timecard templates help businesses manage tasks, meet project deadlines, maintain HR budget, and perform a number of other tasks:

• Calculate labor cost
• Track sick leave, holidays, and training hours
• Calculate monetary compensation and bill clients
• Track productivity
• Identify what may cause delays of work completion
• Monitor tasks and schedule projects
• Create HR budget
• Forecast future HR expenditure

Benefits of electronic employee timesheets

The specific items for your agenda will depend on the requirements of your boards and the type of meeting. Let’s assume that this upcoming meeting will be the inaugural meeting for your team leaders or coordinating board. You’re hoping to establish a consistent structure to this and future gatherings of this type. This agenda provides guidance on how to run a board meeting. Consider the following as a roadmap for your agenda:

• Call to order: Depending on your organizational needs, the person running the meeting (usually a chairperson) may officially start with a call to order. This can include introductory remarks, a statement of the meeting or association’s purpose, formal introductions of board members, and the establishment of board meeting procedures.
• Approval of the agenda: At this point, the chairperson may call for formal approval of the agenda. Participants will submit additions or deletions, leading to acceptance of the proposed items for discussion.
• Reduce time waste and prioritize tasks. Timesheets help schedule tasks, define those that require too much time and optimize the schedule accordingly.
• Approval of previous meeting minutes: For an initial meeting, there won’t be minutes or a summary of a previous meeting for discussion, but you can add a placeholder here for future conferences. Members of the board should offer changes for formal acceptance and documentation.
• Committee updates: Board meetings are often part of a record that may be accessible by various audiences, so this is a good place to provide reports or updates on the various committees and subgroups whose business is of interest to the board. Be sure to provide time for reports and discussions, as appropriate.
• Old business: In subsequent gatherings, the board will have issues that are unresolved from the last meeting. This is an opportunity to resolve these issues with votes or tabled discussions to be scheduled for another time.
• New business: At this point, new items of discussion should take center stage. There should be agreement and documentation of action plans for each point, including a referral to committee, tabling for discussion, and if possible, the date of the proposed resolution. It’s also important to record who will be responsible for the resolution of each item.
• Comments and announcements: If appropriate, you can provide a time for attendees to make comments for the benefit of the board. The chairperson or other member can make announcements about the next board meeting or other relevant information.
• Adjournment: This is the formal ending of the meeting, bookending the call to order. The official time should be noted with a reminder of the date for the next meeting.

Meetings can be disorganized, ineffective, or too long without a consistent board meeting agenda format.

Distributing Agenda Information

Because the agenda includes approvals, you may want to send a board meeting agenda sample in advance. Members can see the proposed agenda and minutes and have their changes ready beforehand. Depending on your organization, the agenda and minutes may need to be shared with other entities, including a legal department, other stakeholders, a document control manager, a communications lead, a public relations representative, or the general public. Your board meeting procedures should include processes for communicating agendas to board members ahead of time and other parties after the fact.

Experiencing a New Agenda

Fluix is your flexible, powerful, cloud-based system for workflow and document management for your conferences for organizational leadership. Generate agendas and minutes quickly, consistently, and electronically with this lightweight platform that can be accessed on any computer or mobile device. You don’t need to be a coding expert or purchase a special operating system. Distribute anything meeting-related, including board meeting agenda examples.