For large residential care organisations with hundreds of homes or domiciliary providers with dozens of UK branches, managing Board and regional meetings can be a challenge.
The volume of information required for each Board meeting can be overwhelming, difficult to collate and time-consuming to circulate to all attendees. The materials that need to be shared and digested often includes sensitive health and safety records, confidential commercial information, and complex financial data. And sharing such materials as hard copies or electronically via email presents several risks to an organisation.
However, technology can play a vital role in helping Chairpersons, CEOs and Executive PAs to transform the effectiveness and efficiency of Board meetings to achieve better outcomes.
Let’s look at the sort of challenges you may be experiencing, and how your formal meetings can run more efficiently with our tips for effective meeting management.
What are the challenges with Board meetings in large care organisations?
Losing clarity
It can sometimes be the case that the conversation steers in a direction that the meeting wasn’t originally intended. But losing clarity of the meeting objectives can really halt productivity, having a knock-on effect on other tasks if next steps aren’t reached.
It’s understandable why this can happen though. The social care sector can be extremely busy with lots of things needing to be discussed. And it can sometimes be the case that a conversation triggers other discussions that aren’t necessarily to do with the original topic. However, this can prevent the initial goal from being achieved and another meeting needing to be scheduled.
Complex, time-consuming agendas
As you likely know, Board meetings in social care can involve complex agendas that require collaborative problem-solving and lots of important minute’s needing to be taken. But with all the many meetings, documents and decisions to make, vital information can be mislaid, or old versions of the materials circulated.
And often with complexity comes slow processes. It can sometimes take more time for board members or stakeholders to effectively communicate and make the necessary decisions because important matters of course need a thorough analysis. And when participants are trying to make decisions with inaccurate information, it takes further time and effort to resolve.
Inefficient meetings that over-run impose a hidden cost on organisations when the attendees’ salaries are taken into account. For example, in a study of time budgeting at large organisations, management consultant firm - Bain & Company - found that a single weekly meeting scheduled for all mid-level managers was costing one multi-national company $15M per year.
Varied working models
Hybrid working is increasingly common with modern life. According to the Office for National Statistics, 28% of employees in the UK travelled to work and worked from home in 2022/23. And it may even be the case that your meeting members work on the go. This can, however, add to the difficulty of getting everyone together at the same time, and harder still to get everyone looking at the same piece of information.
Combining in-person participants with virtual meetings via Microsoft Teams, Zoom etc can also create challenges with participation or can even make it difficult to lead a meeting if people are simply struggling to follow along.
How to make your Board meetings run more efficiently
1. Everyone should prepare before hand
A well-managed meeting should start will a well-managed agenda, one that the participants can view and analyse before the meeting has even started. This is important so people can proactively review any documentation or adjust their strategies in line with the purpose of the meeting.
Meeting management software can allow you to securely circulate the meeting pack in advance and may even let you see just how much of the documents the participants have viewed. Stakeholders can then add their own notes or comments ahead of time too, giving everyone the opportunity to have their input even if they can’t make it to the actual meeting.
2. Active engagement is your best friend
Meetings are a space for effective communication and collaboration, playing a crucial role in decision-making processes within social care. And you don’t want to find yourself spending even more time in another meeting because you’ve struggled to get definitive answers.
Meeting management software allows your board members to collaborate with confidence, giving the opportunity to vote (privately or publicly) or raise a question, with these decisions being recorded for you so you don’t have to keep track of who said what. Having this feature can help stakeholders actively engage with the decision-making process, something that can be a challenge especially when there are lots of agenda items and many participants in the meeting.
3. Keep to the schedule
It has likely been the case that meetings have run over, or you just haven’t been able to get to everything you planned because of one reason or another. As we have already mentioned, giving participants advanced notice of the agenda and materials can help here as they can come better prepared and hopefully not steer the conversation away from its original purpose. But what about when the meeting is in full swing?
Slow processes can eat into the schedule, and the administrative burden of meetings can be one of the tasks slowing it down.
According to research carried out of 1,100 directors by the leading consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, they found that 46% of survey respondents said that the Chair of their Board did not run meetings efficiently and effectively.
So, instead of someone having to manually take the minutes or tally the votes, meeting management software can do all that for you, removing those time-consuming necessities and bringing the main focus of the meeting back to the forefront.
4. Summarise and set actions
Wrapping up a meeting and setting actions is another crucial step for making your social care meetings more efficient. It ensures that the time spent discussing ideas and making decisions isn’t going to be wasted, but rather transformed into actual outcomes and not just another meeting being scheduled to pick up where you left off.
And when people know exactly who is accountable and what needs to be done next, you’re in a better position to track progress being made and keep that important momentum going. Meeting management software can support you with this as notifications can be sent when an assigned action is overdue or has been completed.
So, could your meetings run more efficiently, reach key decisions faster and achieve better outcomes? Our Meeting Management software is designed to help Board members and stakeholders collaborate with confidence, being empowered to make strategic decisions with enhanced efficiency and security.