Tips for Energizing Online Board Meetings

Online board meetings can be a valuable instrument for making informed decisions. If they’re not properly run, they can lead boredom and low levels of participation. Use these tips to energize your virtual meetings and improve productivity.

Make the agenda available prior to the meeting with all participants to ensure that everyone understands what will be discussed. Also, think about asking your board members to tune in from a quiet area free of distractions. Likewise, ask participants to utilize your virtual meeting software’s “raise hand” function whenever they need to speak, in order to avoid over-talking and losing the point.

Keep the data protection best practices discussion focused on the most important issues by setting a agreed-upon maximum speaking time for each item. This allows everyone to contribute and avoids discussion going off-topic or distracting other participants. It is a good idea to ask your board members to mute their microphones when not speaking to silence background noises like pets, kids and coworkers.

Last but not least, close the meeting promptly. This shows respect for the time of your fellow board members. It is also a good idea to share the minutes promptly after the meeting is over. It can also be helpful to streamline the process of recording and distribution of minutes by using the built-in features of your board management software such as inline task delegation.

This will ensure that everyone is on the same page about what transpired at the meeting and what has to be done between meetings.