Conducting effective condominium board meetings
Assessments work. A very effective practice for Board members is to evaluate the quality of their operations. Board members often don’t know what they don’t know about their own Board. Board evaluations are required in many for-profit industries. These Board members know that it is critical to regularly conduct brief, hands-on evaluations of Board operations and then act on the results of those evaluations throughout the year.
Evaluations do not take a long time: many times, even 15 minutes a year for each Board member to complete a short questionnaire, followed by half an hour to discuss the results and plan an improvement strategy.
Some boards may feel like they don’t need evaluations. I would suggest that these boards complete the free board evaluation tool offered by BoardWalk Consulting. This evaluation must also be completed confidentially. If your board scores less than eight on any of the five criteria, then it may be time for an evaluation to find and correct deficiencies in your operations.
Before embarking on the exercise to evaluate your board, make sure everyone agrees with this exercise and the first question to ask yourself is, what are we evaluating? There are different evaluations that can be completed, such as the effectiveness of the board or the individual members of the board. The individual performance of board members should never be evaluated until everyone has been briefed on their role within the board. It can be demoralizing to be evaluated against criteria that you didn’t know was part of your responsibility. We will focus this article on effectiveness on board as a whole.
Here are some sample questions to help evaluate your board’s performance. Have your board members complete the survey and then summarize the responses. Instruct your board members that the survey should be completed quickly and honestly – don’t overthink the responses.
Some points to consider before implementing the evaluation.
1. Make sure your questionnaire is relevant to your company and the items you want to measure. Your board members will lose interest in answering irrelevant questions.
2. For evaluations to work, everyone must be open and honest. The only way to do this is to ensure the confidentiality of the questionnaire. Have an independent third party prepare the summaries.
3. Don’t try to be too thorough in your evaluation.
Commit to act on the results of your survey. These evaluation tools provide an excellent picture of a board’s strengths and weaknesses. Its power is proven. If these exercises are not tracked, then they are simply a waste of your volunteers’ time and energy.
– The board has a full and common understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the members, management and staff within the corporation.
– The board receives periodic reports on finances / budgets, product / program performance, and other important matters.
– The board communicates effectively with the community.
– Board meetings facilitate focus and progress on important issues.
– Each member of the board feels involved and interested in the work of the board.
– Directors receive regular training and information on their responsibilities.
– The new members of the board of directors are oriented to the board of directors, including an operating manual for the board of directors, the Declaration of Companies, the Bylaws and the Law, as well as their roles and responsibilities as members of the board of directors.
– The organization of the board is documented with a description of the responsibilities of the board and the board committee.
– The organization has at least the minimum number of members on the Board of Directors required by its statutes or the law.
– The board has a process for handling urgent matters between meetings.
– The board has an annual meeting calendar.
– Meetings have written agendas and materials related to important decisions are given to the board prior to the meeting.
– Conflicts between directors do not interfere with the work of the Board.
– Our financial control and monitoring systems allow us to quickly identify errors and protect ourselves from most criminal activities.
– I am proud to be a director of this corporation.
Responses should be classified simply as “Agree or Disagree”, compiled and summarized. I like to see the summaries in bar graph format.
These summaries for each question can be used to determine if there is a problem in a particular area and can also help prioritize areas to focus on for improvement.
Condominium corporations would do well to take note of the practices of the boards of directors in highly effective companies. While industries may be different, the need for an effective decision-making structure is the same.
