Guide to Virtual Board Meetings With OnBoard

Best practices, tips, and guidance for using OnBoard to lead a virtual board meeting. Under these extraordinary circumstances, learn how OnBoard is being leveraged to make decisions, provide strategic guidance, and keep communication channels open.

Centralize All Business Materials & Resources

When your directors and leadership aren’t together and without access to a Shared Drive, there must be a central repository where everyone can go to get information. OnBoard’s unlimited resource center is vital for organizing information you need now, like your Remote Work Policy, Crisis Resilience Plan, Bylaws, and every past Meeting Minute.

The Minutes Builder unifies your workflow, enabling you to make minutes directly within OnBoard for your board and leadership teams. Effortlessly make notes, create tasks, track attendance, and mark motions as the meeting progresses. The builder makes it easy to focus on the meeting itself, a must have for every meeting workflow.

The Resource Center is a life-line during a period of remote work. You can’t afford to waste days scouring Email, Microsoft Teams, Text Messages, or the Shared Drive. OnBoard is the natural location to keep all business documents, keeping directors and leadership teams organized.

OnBoard’s Security is vetted thousands of times each year by IT teams because it’s designed for extremely sensitive business materials. It’s built on Microsoft Azure, SOC2 certified, and protected by Two-Factor Authentication. That makes it among the safest choice leadership teams have available for remote file storage. And it means you can skip the pain of getting a VPN up-and-running to access the office server.

Permission Management at the individual and group level makes OnBoard a compelling tool to keep information in the right hands. Share your Business Continuity and Resilience Folder with everyone while keeping the board meeting archive exclusively in the hands of directors and the CEO.

Create Clarity on a Meetings Purpose & Place

It was a 48-hour period few will ever forget, leaders found themselves in hastily organized meetings to create new remote work policies and consider their business’ resilience. In that period, OnBoard provided each meeting with clarity of purpose, streamlined access, and focused on solving problems.

The Dashboard is the first item your team sees when they sign-into OnBoard – a customizable page showing them urgent announcements, upcoming meetings, and new and important documents. It keeps priorities aligned, information flowing, and your team ready for the next meeting.

Zoom Integration and Video Conferencing results in one-tap access to any conferencing software. It promises prompt meetings, without having to wonder if someone dialed the wrong number or missed an invite.

Ensure Timely & Accurate Communication

Leaders are leveraging OnBoard to create internal announcements for management and organize a decisive response to the coronavirus outbreak. And as new documents flow into OnBoard, directors and leaders are notified in-app and over email that new information is available. That meant that as your team needs to rapidly act, everyone is aligned and focused on the problems they needed to solve.

The Announcement panel keeps your team aligned around emergency responses, major announcements – everything you need to know as communication channels are challenged by remote work.
Only the latest copy of every document is available in OnBoard – that means your valuable time isn’t squandered deciding if information is current or relevant.
Notifications are sent as new information flows into OnBoard. You’re alerted in-app or over email when new reports are available, or finance projections were updated. That meant that as the coronavirus crisis unfolded, leaders kept focus on problems to solve and not questioning the veracity of their information.
The Minutes Builder unifies your workflow, enabling you to make minutes directly within OnBoard. Effortlessly make notes, create tasks, track attendance, and mark motions as the meeting progresses. The builder makes it easy to focus on the meeting itself, a must have for every meeting workflow.

4. Leverage Advanced Preparation Tools

OnBoard provides your team a complete suite of tools to make agile, context-rich decisions. It allows anyone on your team to update and shape a meeting’s agenda and makes information flow unabated with sufficient time to review. By equipping leaders with tools like shared annotations and a secure instant messenger, it allows them to think critically and communicate seamlessly – no matter where they are.

OnBoard Messenger allows your whole board and leadership team to collaborate individually or in a group before, during, and after meetings. As teams rapidly responded to the public health crisis, they often established a group channel dedicated to the crisis – to communicate and coordinate their business’ response.

OnBoard’s Meeting Analytics provides insight into which meeting sections are receiving the most attention and where leadership and board members are making significant notes and annotations. It’s clear-eyed data that guides leadership toward both critically important and overlooked meeting information.

Notes & Annotations often spur ideas and can help others think more deeply in advance of your meetings. OnBoard enables users to share notes publicly or with specific individuals. So as remote leadership becomes the new norm, management can raise an important point without needing an in-person side-bar conversation.

Task Management create predictable information flows while keeping action items front and center. It ensures your team knows when to expect new reports and data. And by tracking meeting deliverables, it keeps meetings focused on the future strategy rather than a backward status report.

Adopt Decision-Making Tools to Reach Consensus

Reaching consensus and quickly capturing the views of your directors and leadership is essential when fast-moving problems are tackled remotely. OnBoard helps your team reach consensus and make decisions between and during meetings.
Voting & Approvals formally record your board’s and teams’ decisions. As you confront fast-moving challenges, your leaders need to be able to make consequential decisions without formally convening an emergency meeting.
eSignatures provide the ability to execute contracts and sign agreements without your team losing momentum. For example, loan committees frequently accelerate their ability to evaluate and issue capital on an ongoing basis leading to substantial new revenue.
Surveys offer your board and leadership team a way to gauge ideas, offer feedback, or decide on smaller-scale issues. And as teams have fewer opportunities during remote work for chance encounters and brainstorming sessions, getting fast insights is incredibly valuable.

Unlock Superior Board Governance

Streamline your board meetings and unlock valuable insights with OnBoard’s powerful platform. Experience the difference of secure, efficient, and intuitive board management software designed for success.