Your agenda for board meetings will help you reach your goals and help make meetings more productive. It sets the tone for the entire meeting, outlines the topics to be discussed, and ensures that everyone has the same chance to be involved.
The distribution of the agenda in advance will help attendees to be prepared and ready to participate. This will allow attendees to ask questions or provide feedback prior to the meeting. It’s best to have someone with a deep understanding of your organization’s mission and compliance requirements as well as the current business environment take the lead in crafting a well-structured agenda for board meetings. This is usually the person who founded the company or the chairman of the board.
The meeting should begin with an order of the hour and an overview of the previous meeting minutes. Then, include a space for reports from key department head or committee members (eg. governance committee reports and finance committee reports). It’s also beneficial to include a section for old business items (follow-ups or ongoing projects) and for new business items (proposals or strategic initiatives).
Each item on the agenda an appropriate amount of time, but don’t go overboard with it. Too much information can cause confusion among participants and hinder an open discussion. It is better to organize more details in an individual document that can be handed out to those who are interested later on, rather boardroomadventures.com/how-to-plan-a-board-meeting-agenda/ instead of filling the agenda with unnecessarily detailed or lengthy reports. The chairperson of the board is expected to officially end the meeting once all open issues and new business has been discussed.