Online boardroom meetings are not much different from traditional boardroom meetings. Their main purpose is to make decisions on important issues and on the life of the company, and to develop new strategies for success. However, virtual meetings do have one key difference: they take place online. Therefore, all the issues responsible for their organisation and conduct must be handled digitally.
First and foremost, this concerns the management and use of the documents that will be needed during the virtual meeting. There are a number of requirements for such documents:
- They should be easily accessible to all board members or meeting organisers;
- They must be in a readable format;
- They must be protected by current cybersecurity standards.
To ensure that business documents are always at hand, some basic rules for digital document management should be followed:
- A special virtual repository should be set up to store documents. Digital data rooms are now actively used for this purpose. A virtual boardroom also provides access to such a repository, which saves considerable time in searching for the necessary document.
- All board members should have the same access to the repository. In this way, it is possible to ensure that everyone can view a document or make digital notes on it during a meeting. It is also important to be able to send or send a document back to the repository quickly.
- Minutes of the meeting should be kept. Usually, when using online board meeting software, a record is kept of the actions of all participants. This is not only necessary to keep a record of those present. In the event that a document is damaged or lost, a user activity history will help to see who was the last person to use it.
In addition, the use of an encryption system is recommended to ensure a higher level of security for documents.
What else can be done to make documents more usable?
There are also some other tips for organising the use of documents:
- Make advance preparations for the meeting. Plans for an online meeting are probably made well in advance of the meeting itself. Before the meeting, it is better to make preliminary preparations and collect all the necessary documents in one folder. This will save a lot of time searching during the meeting itself.
- Do a careful selection of documents. Documents can be kept in a series or in binders, but not all of the contents are likely to be discussed at the meeting. It is better to select documents of interest in advance and make a digital copy that can be used by all board members.
- Select only reliable people to handle the documents. Typically, at the preparatory stages of an online management meeting, it is not the directors themselves who do the preliminary work, but their personal assistants, secretaries or entire committees. The selection of documents should be entrusted to a team of experienced professionals who are trained to handle digital documents.
Good digital document management software should not be forgotten. It should be of high quality, integrated into the corporate document management system and meet all cybersecurity standards. The functionality of most online management meeting platforms usually has a variety of buttons and options that enable you to create the best possible internal document organisation.