DON’T WASTE YOUR PRECIOUS TIME Board Meetings Transformation

At Comtrade System Integration, we’re implementing Teams for more than a year.

But, from the beginning of March, when COVID-19 crisis started, I’ve faced several challenges when talking to our customers.

IT is under heavy pressure of figuring out how to deploy a solution, though the question is who’s responsible for the adoption.

When we speak to the IT department, I see that they’re frustrated: suddenly, they also need to take care of enabling the users and setting the governance.

On the other hand, when I talk with board members or upper management who aren’t in IT, they don’t really care about Teams or Microsoft. They don’t want to attend Teams’ webinars, or anything similar. They just want to have a solution that’s build for purpose and working with ease. If it runs on Office 365 or Teams – that’s fine with them, especially if the company already owns a license.

With that said, Office 365 and Teams with conference calls are a perfect solution, but they don’t offer out-of-the-box results. This is especially important for the board members and the upper management, since they need to maintain their executive leadership responsibilities on a regular basis, while sharing large volumes of extremely important information. Also, in case you need an important and adequate solution, don’t try to adopt it on your own if you don’t have a real development department.

Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t develop apps for every problem. That’s why they’ve built a good ecosystem with Office 365 solutions, while supporting partners who’re making apps to become part of it.

Solutions for Board Management Meetings

Before March 2020, board meetings were in-person, and in a lot of companies they were still using paper or emails. Usual procedure included:

• An outdated, paper-based system,
• Inviting participants,
• Creating agenda,
• Printing materials,
• Voting,
• Time-consuming processes of scheduling meetings, preparing documents, and so on,
• Lack of standardized meeting procedures,
• Decentralized documentation.

What Does a Board Meeting Need?

Board and the upper management meetings are organized in advance, since they deal with the complex preparation of agendas and a lot of supporting documents that the members should read beforehand.

For a meeting to be successful, it’s important to have a proper scheduling and planning of a meeting, as well as a good management and protection of sensitive information. Regardless of the culture of your organization and the technical abilities of your board, the meetings of your executives have certain requirements and needs that must be met, in order to ensure the uninterrupted business of your company, and, consequently, its future. Some of those requirements include:

Security – Since they share a lot of private data, regarding the inner mechanics of a company, board meetings need a safe place to store their content. Also, many members take their own notes during the meetings, and those need to be protected, as well;

Preparation – Dealing with a huge amount of documents and information, board meetings require an immaculate organization and preparation of all files and its content in advance, in order for a meeting to be productive;

Efficiency – Board members and the upper management are responsible for all company’s businesses. With that said, their time is invaluable, so when the meeting starts, they should avoid wasting minutes on trying to find current and past documents during the meeting, as well as losing their focus on technicalities.

Who Can Provide It?

Being the most important part of a company – the ones that lead her, executives don’t really care about what tools they’ll use for these online meetings, as long as they meet stated-above requirements, i.e., as long as they provide them with security, preparation, and efficiency. Microsoft Teams, with its effective governance, is a tool that provides all three of them.

In order to improve board meetings’ efficiency, save time, and securely share information fast, we at Comtrade developed a solution E-Session – a suite of digital tools that help decision makers access the right information, in no time. Implementation of E-Session helps companies drastically improve their productivity and decision-making, while reducing costs.

The solution supports full management of materials for e-sessions, with:

• Electronic registry office,
• Case management follow,
• Preparation of sessions,
• Session processing and voting.

E-Session is based on Microsoft technology, and provides seamless integration with Office 365, Skype for Business, and other Microsoft collaboration tools.

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