Tips for hosting board meetings
Apr 16, 2020- When planning your agenda, keep in mind which time zones your participants are in.
- Start the meeting with brief instructions to ensure everyone knows how to use the virtual meeting software. Consider sending out materials prior to the meeting that answer common questions.
- Encourage participants/presenters to silence cell phones
- Encourage participants to find a place in their home with minimal distractions
- Password-protect your meeting.
- Give attendees plenty of time to connect and greet each other prior to the meeting, as well as test their audio/video connections.
- At the start of your meeting, take a roll call to ensure you know who is present.
- Take more frequent, short breaks than you would during an in-person meeting — every 8-10 minutes. This could be an actual break from the meeting or a visual break to split up content.
- Consider how your meeting cadence might change now that attendees don’t need to travel. Can you have more frequent, shorter meetings?
- If using Zoom, use the waiting room feature to allow participants into the meeting either one by one or as a group.
- If using Zoom, consider using the breakout feature for smaller-group work so attendees only need to call in once.
- To avoid distractions, have someone who isn’t running the meeting monitor the chat room/raise-hand features.
- Through settings, this individual can be a cohost with the same permissions as the host.
- If there are multiple speakers and each have visuals, collect and combine them ahead of time so the meeting is seamless. The cohost can manage the changing visuals.