5 Ways to Make Your Virtual Board Meetings Great

Cloud Concinnity®: The turnkey software solution for your next board meeting and for end to end Board Management

The coronavirus is forcing businesses to adapt overnight. One of the biggest areas affected will be board meetings themselves. For the foreseeable future, these will be virtual. In the midst of the current crisis they undoubtedly will be more frequent. Top of house teams need a way to make them great and a cloud-based way to manage these governance processes end to end. 

With travel interrupted, staff working from home, and every day bringing changes to the new reality of doing business, it’s critical to move now to plan and execute your next board meeting in the cloud. 

Cloud Concinnity® is the turnkey software solution for end-to-end Board Management. Importantly for today’s environment, it was designed for creating, supporting, and implementing every aspect of board meetings online. Unlike any other solution, we had that in mind for you day one.

One shared hub, one shared goal. 

Here’s what Cloud Concinnity® does for you

1. Plan Your Virtual Board Meeting in the Cloud 

With staff working from home indefinitely, you need a central, secure hub to plan your next board meeting. This is not the time to leave mission critical oversight to the vagaries and errors of manual processes. This is not the time to cobble together a solution from multiple tools that aren’t designed to work together and are not secure.  

Cloud Concinnity® not only hosts all meeting materials, but all relevant information and communications. It keeps key players and support staff connected, and does so in a way that stays in compliance with regulatory requirements.

Cloud Concinnity® is designed for cloud planning and collaboration. You can manage alerts for meetings, content, reviews, signatures, and other updates from one dashboard. Roles based permissions keep communication and information flowing while keeping everyone in their lanes. Streamlined access, automated processes, and transparent outcome tracking every step of the way.

2. Run Your Entire Meeting in the Cloud

Hosting  all board materials and support documents (not just an online board book, but all the historical and support documents) is just the beginning of managing effective governance in the new environment. Cloud Concinnity® is your one shared hub, to execute on your one shared goal. Your entire board meeting can now happen in the cloud. 

Cloud Concinnity® supports video conferencing, agenda management, shared document viewing, online voting, and taking live minutes on a single platform, which is exactly the kind of power your virtual board meeting will require. No more ad hoc workarounds to communicate or to share and process sensitive corporate information.  

Real time board meetings, communication and information sharing in a dedicated cloud platform means staying effective in a crisis, not slowing down. 

3. Execute Next Steps Immediately from the Cloud

The next board agenda is going to have a fresh sense of urgency. 

Next steps will need to be centralized, streamlined, and tracked. Again, a cloud tool is the ideal workspace for top of house to make this happen because it is transparent and secure simultaneously. 

Cloud Concinnity® makes notes and next steps immediately transparent to everyone involved, and enables your team to bundle workflows with the documents on a single hub, then track progress. Your notes and next steps will act as action triggers, and the entire team will have visibility into who is responsible for what and how progress is coming along. Push notifications keeps everyone on track and on schedule.

4. Track Outcomes Right in the Cloud

Making outcomes trackable and transparent is more critical than ever. 

Cloud Concinnity®’s board scorecard tracks engagement over time. The company dashboard provides transparency & accountability at a glance. Because everything is centralized in the cloud, the top of house gets unprecedented insight into performance. 

Data shouldn’t hide. A single, cloud based tool builds outcomes into company-wide memory, which keeps momentum moving and top of mind. 

5. Operationalize Best Practice Governance for the Long Term

Cloud Concinnity® Makes Virtual Board Meetings Great, and your next board meeting is fast approaching. We can get you set up overnight for that and for the work to come.

Just turning on a conference call or webinar isn’t what you need for this meeting, or the next, or the long term or for the level of excellence you need.

Cloud based, institutionalized best practice governance is the new imperative for the top of the house. Turnkey Board Management Software is the solution.

The radical shift to remote work will persist long after the Coronavirus is in the rearview mirror. The profound changes in work, governance and risk management demand change for the long term.

The time for a patchwork solution is past.

The urgency of a cloud-based comprehensive system is upon us.

Cloud Concinnity®: The Turnkey Solution

In times of crisis, smart software solves problems — both expected and unexpected.

It should remove the barriers between top of house leaders, put an end to the inefficiency and risks of reinventing the wheel with manual process and workflows and eliminate scrambling for access or a password or wondering if you have the right version or asking someone to send you a document.

Smart software should centralize everything into a single hub, utilize integrated video, audio, and text, all protected with top level security. It should support staff and assistants by enabling the  building of processes once, operationalizing alerts and reminders to keep the board and senior management on the same page while working remotely.

Cloud Concinnity® is a comprehensive, turnkey workspace for top of house teams and mission critical processes. In a world where chaos is the new normal, leaders need to be agile and have the real-time intelligence to do great work.

Our founders have 100+ years of top of house experience between us, from the c-suite to the boardroom. We know what it takes to do great work in tough times. 

We’re ready to help.

Our CTO's Practical Advice on Working Remotely

Chief Technology Officer, The Concinnity Company 

We’ve seen a deluge of “expert” articles from consulting companies and established firms quickly adjusting to remote work. In my experience, these new-comers are the last people you should be listening to as they are making the same mistakes that companies who’ve done this for years can tell you to avoid. 

At TCC we are moving from 80% remote to 100%, so we’ve had a great head start and are happy to give you some practical advice. 

Practical Advice on Working Remote

• My dogs really distrust the Amazon guy, and loud barking is very distracting (much more so than the things in peoples backgrounds). If you get as many packages as we do, go ahead and put the pups somewhere out of earshot before you begin.  (@microsoft teams, @zoom please add a bark detecting - auto-mute feature). This also applies to cats on keyboards. 

• The top complaint of remote workers is that they are never off the clock. When your boss feels that you’re the same distance both on and off hours (just a message or call away!) they don’t hesitate to call. Either embrace the 24 hour work life. If your employee are answering emails / messages at 11pm, you can emphasize how dedicated they are and just accept that they are walking their dogs / doing laundry when you call sometimes. Or be strict and use applications that have ‘office hours’ built in. 

• Create a nonsense area, such as a “water cooler” chat group, in your messaging application where it’s encouraged and expected people will discuss out of work issues or general nonsense. Just because people are working remotely doesn’t mean they should be all business all the time. They need to build relationships and getting off topic is just natural. 

• Does your office enjoy sharing lunch time? With video chat, between the time delay, and not always looking directly at the person you are talking too, people often ask questions while you’re mid-bite. If you’ve ever tried to chew through a mouth full of food, while apologizing to everyone for having a mouth full of food, and also being 2 seconds delayed, it’s really awkward (0 stars, would not recommend). Try doing a shared coffee / drinks half hour instead. We like to start off just talking about which type of tea or 5pm beer everyone is trying at home.

• Get the software you need in place ASAP. If you don’t have messaging, task management and video chat all setup, call us! Remote is what we do, and how we work. 

And finally, here are some other people to learn from who know what’s up:

• Tech: Automattic (creators of WordPress) - A Crash Course in Remote Management

• Journalism: Momsrising.org - Working From Home with Kids

• Design: Invision – Remote Work for Design Teams

10 Steps You Can Take Now to Get Organized and Lead During the Coronavirus Crisis

There has never been a more important time to get organized and lead.

The impact of the Coronavirus has been sudden and far-reaching, and many businesses are not prepared for the long haul that this will be. 

Are you?

Work has moved online. The boardroom is now in the cloud. With work-from-home mandates and corporate travel restrictions in place for the foreseeable future, we are just beginning the work of managing the impact of Coronavirus on our economy and our lives.

Leaders need to guide their response from a single place. 

Cloud Concinnity® is the only comprehensive virtual mission control available that is designed around everything that top of house leadership needs.

Here are 10 Steps You Can Take Now to Get Organized and Lead During the Coronavirus Crisis

1. Embrace Long Term Crisis Management Mode

This is not a few days of travel delay. This is a marathon. This crisis is going to drag on. You need something built for the long haul, and we are just at the beginning. We don’t even know what this will look like as it develops, but we know this is going to hit us all hard. It’s going to ripple, and your team is going to need to get ready.

2. Begin Daily Planning Meetings for Coronavirus Contingency Planning

Your leadership is scattered across the country and likely working from home. The answer is not sporadic, long meetings. The answer is a daily virtual scrum where everyone on your leadership team can join a quick (virtual) morning huddle to explain what they’re working on and share resources, keeping everyone on the same page. 

3. Upgrade Your Leadership’s Software Platform

Dial in meetings are nowhere near enough. You need to see each other. Video conferencing alone will not cut it. You need to be inside a cloud platform that can hold all of your files. Virtual meeting software alone is not enough. You need workflow automation integrated so everyone stays on the same page between meetings. Remember, this is for the long-haul, not for a day or two. And because you’re leadership, you need the highest security protocols in place to protect proprietary information. One of the things that makes Cloud Concinnity® so powerful is that we offer comprehensive and secure document storage inside the same cloud platform as video conferencing, process automation and meeting documentation. You only need one tool. 

4. Get Everything Important Into The Cloud Now

Your leadership should be able to do as good of work from home as when they are in the office. The only way to do that is to get everything mission critical into the cloud, and make it available to everyone on your leadership team. With upgraded software, you can do that.

5. Make Your Virtual Meetings Great

You can’t cancel your board meeting - so what do you do instead? A comprehensive virtual mission control means everyone can be as effective and as present as they would have been in person. All the information they need in front of them. Totally secure. Logged and documented. And in a cloud platform that keeps everyone safe. 

6. Be More Efficient. Period

You don’t have time to not be efficient. Your distributed leadership team is even more distributed, and a crisis doesn’t wait. Using multiple software tools patch-worked together instead of a comprehensive solution means wasting time jumping back and forth between windows, fumbling for login information, and constantly asking each other where a certain file or message was. With Cloud Concinnity®, everything is always in the same place. Right where you need it.

7. Automate as Much Process as Possible

With everyone out of the office, the normal cadence of in-person “reminders” is gone. But you still need to keep your leadership team on track to sign documents, keep meetings, and generally stay on track. And everyone on your team is already stressed and operating in an unfamiliar environment from home. Make your software work for you by offering a comprehensive solution that lets your team automate workflows to reduce repetitive work and give everyone room to focus on strategy and crisis management.

8. Maintain Director Goodwill 

Proactively streamlining work during the crisis and quarantine period will help keep everyone calm and on track. The last thing you need is people squabbling about which version of a document to use, or forgetting the details that used to be routine, or unhappy grumbling that goes unaddressed. Meet early, often, and in a comprehensive way to keep your virtual mission control team on point and happy. And nothing keeps a leadership team happier than not having to scramble for their information.

9. Increase Engagement

While it’s easy to think that working from home or a canceled board meeting means less work and less engagement, this kind of crisis is actually cause for the board and senior leadership to meet more often. Shorter, more frequent meetings in the cloud mean everyone on the team can stay agile and mobile, but still focused from wherever they are. That means better decisions and crisis management. 

10. Learn From The Challenge

We will come out of this stronger than we were before. Leadership teams who root out and fix inefficiencies in order to navigate a crisis will find that there is no need to go back to those inefficiencies down the road when we are through this. Be aware, be nimble, and be ready to change. Learn from the challenge we are all being thrust into and get ready to come out the other side even better at what you do for your organization. 

Cloud Concinnity® is the only comprehensive virtual mission control available that is designed around everything that top of house leadership needs.

It is the solution for leadership teams to who need a way to work together efficiently and effectively to navigate the Coronavirus crisis.

We can get you up and running in 24 hours.

Our software offers a single secure control hub for integrated data, communications and process management.

And we are offering RAPID ONBOARDING for your board and senior leadership teams along with reduced onboarding fees.

It’s Time To Turn On Your Leadership’s Virtual Mission Control.

Or, call us directly.

Smart Software in the Age of the Coronavirus: 5 Reasons to Upgrade Now

The impact of COVID-19 (aka coronavirus) has been swift and severe. 

Governments around the world are scrambling to respond, business and civic leadership struggle to reassure, and last week the stock market took a giant nosedive, losing over $3 trillion in market value. 

At the same time, Zoom Video Communications’ stock has risen dramatically, and Zoom has added 2.22 million monthly active users so far this year — that’s more than the 1.99 million it added during all of 2019.

This statistic points to a powerful, sobering truth: In times of crisis, smart software solves problems — both expected and unexpected.

Smart software means peace of mind and crisis-ready process at the top of the house. In a world where chaos is the new normal, leaders need to be agile and have the real-time intelligence to do great work.

Here’s why NOW is the time for top of house teams to adopt smart software.

1. CRISIS DOESN’T WAIT. In a world where fear can cause massive shifts in the stock market, leaders must be ready to react to these kinds of black swan events at the drop of a hat. Preparing for the unexpected is part of doing business. Whether it is the coronavirus, a stock market drop off, or an internal company crisis, there is always less time to react than you need.

   The people who need to communicate earliest and most often in a crisis are the board and the c-suite. Crisis is when we need agile teams at the top of the house. Oddly, it is the top of house teams who often have the least interconnectedness. It’s an anachronism. A crisis doesn’t wait until you are ready. Smart software is ready when you are.
   

2. TRAVEL IS VULNERABLE. Annual meeting season usually means one thing: travel. But experts project that the Coronavirus will impact all kinds of group gatherings. They are recommending that people prepare for possible school closures, travel disruption, and market disruptions. What is traditionally a gathering of the board in person may need to be, for the first time, a gathering of the board over the web. The norms of business will need to adjust.

   While the Coronavirus scare may feel temporary, this kind of communication challenge — and interruption to our business norms — is only becoming more common. The truth is that as businesses embrace remote work, they are beginning to see travel as less of a luxury and more of an expensive inefficiency that can be problematic for the environment, unreliable, and potentially bad for your health. The future of agile work is in the cloud.
   

3. COMMUNICATION DEMANDS CONTEXT. Remote meetings help minimize the threat to public health by reducing our risk of passing a virus from person to person. Video conferencing feels personal, unlike phone-only conference calls, and can provide a secure connection, unlike email or text. And while distance meetings are a great solution for public health, remote meetings are only part of the solution for business teams.

   The strength of any communication solution is in the context. 

   The real trick is allowing everyone to have all relevant information, integrated data, communications, schedules, and project data with real time updates at their fingertips from any device — whether that is a computer in the office, a smartphone at the airport, or an iPad on the beach! 

   Smart software is that complete secure hub, layering robust communications features on top of remote video conferencing to replace the time, expense and potential risks of travel.
   

4. PROCESS MATTERS. What did you do as the coronavirus crisis began to grow? Did you start to make a mental list of the other key people on your team you needed to talk to? Did you know how to find them quickly and securely? How many people had sensitive conversations about crisis management and board information over text or email that would have been better off through a more secure line of communication?

   Boards, c-suites and top of house teams who have a process for communicating on a dedicated software platform will be more nimble, efficient and reactive in times of crisis like this one. Those who do not plan for this will be left to scramble anew each time.

   For boards and c-suites who spend much of their time on the road and away from each other, building the habit of connecting in a personal way between meetings means building a new way of doing business — and being seamlessly prepared for the next crisis.. 
   

5. REMOTE WORK IS NOT THE FUTURE. IT’S ALREADY HERE. Almost 5 million Americans identify as digital nomads, and HBR identified the “work from anywhere” policy as an emerging trend in business — noting that 43% of American workers have spent at least some time working remotely. Common fears of lower productivity or focus seem unfounded — studies are showing that remote workers are actually more productive. 

   The move toward remote work is happening. It’s about agile work and taking advantage of the ability to work anywhere, anytime. Top of house teams need to be out in front with this, adapting to and leading the way. As offices begin to relax their walls, boards and c-suites that embrace smart software will be leading the way, not playing catch up. 

   Even when this crisis subsides, the reality of remote work as the future of work will continue to grow. 

In Conclusion

Our founders have 100+ years of top of house experience between us. We’ve been there so we know what it takes to do great work.

Cloud Concinnity® is a comprehensive, turn-key workspace for top of house teams and mission critical processes. And because we know crisis doesn’t wait, we can have you up and running in a matter of days. 

If your leadership needs to step up your planning to the potential problems of the coronavirus, call us now. 

It’s not too late. We’re ready to help.

Click here to start the conversation. 

Why Better Technology Creates Better Corporate Culture, Starting With Boards, C-Suites & Investors

Peter Drucker famously told us that culture eats strategy for breakfast. And study after study tells us he’s on to something. Happy teams and a strong company culture mean higher performance across the board. Being named a Best Place to Work is associated with a .75% stock jump. A classic Harvard Business School study found that a performance-enhancing company culture correlates with 4x higher annual revenue growth. The list goes on.

We also know that leadership teams — the board, c-suite, investors, and managers -- set that tone. Company culture flows from the attitudes, priorities, and decisions of its leaders. 

With the digital transformation of work and business culture firmly upon us, what role does software play in corporate culture? Is it just a tool with no role beyond its business function? Or is it so deeply part of how we do our work that it is embedded inside what it takes to build a high performance corporate culture? 

We think smarter technology is essential to great corporate culture. Here’s why:

Agile Means Together, not Rogue.

Agile is a buzzword these days, but it’s often misunderstood. It does not mean people should go out on their own, acting fast and trying new things to see what happens. Agile work for a team actually requires a high level of coordination & commitment to a common cause. This requires an elegant balance of staying in touch and having enough room to breathe and get things done. Think Seal Team 6 or acrobats on a tightrope, not armies storming a castle’s front gates screaming with swords raised. 

Software like Slack, Dropbox, and Google Suite are designed to keep teams on the same page, aligned on next steps, and moving together in rhythm. Cloud Concinnity® is tailored to empower leadership to set the team direction, like a Seal Team Leader or the Circus ringmaster, with extra care around enhanced communication to emphasize security, process automation to curb busywork, and outcome measurement to track progress.

Systems Empower Free Thinking, not Hamper it.

Creative thinkers often buck at the idea of systems, spreadsheets, and measurement — and that makes sense. When wrongfully applied, systems can feel like a cage when they are really an untying of the ropes. Better technology doesn’t add busywork or increase repetitive tasks: it automates them to make room for creative thinking. 

When systems are running in the background, leaders can focus on what matters — strategy, performance and risk. Cloud Concinnity® does this by focusing on outcomes, automating the activities required to achieve them and providing a single secure hub for all necessary content, communications and intelligence.

Teams use Tools, not the Other Way Around.

When a team is small, staying on the same page is not hard. Four or five people talk enough to keep tabs on what each other is doing, and prompt each other to stay on task and aligned on things like timelines and quality. But once success and growth add people to the team, suddenly there are expectations, skill-levels, and understanding of the business are at all different levels. Tools need to evolve, change, and be added, and leadership styles need to change to keep up, as Julie Zhou points out in HBR. 

This is exactly why we shifted from consulting with leadership teams to building software for them. We know that the better an organization is at using software, the better that software can perform — and we went a step further, building industry best practices into the DNA of ours. That way when you use the tool you are guaranteed to be working at a high level. We think that’s smart, and it makes companies smarter, too!

Great Team Dynamics Are Critical to Success, not Just “Nice to Have.” 

Team dynamics are tough, whether it’s a team of two or a team of ten. In fact, data shows that 60% of new ventures fail due to problems with the team. It’s clear that growth depends on good team dynamics, and good team dynamics depends on all the gears of collaboration working together like a symphony.

Strong Technology Enables a Soft Touch, not Just to-do Lists.

We’re all busy and getting busier, with alerts and messages coming from all sides. And all too often when we do have some free time we use it to take on more tasks and get more done. At some point, it catches up to us. As HBR points out, managers and teams alike struggle with burnout. 

The solutions? Things like gratitude, compassion, and modeling self-care. While many leaders will “pooh-pooh” this as too touchy-feely for the corporate world, everyone from Deloitte to Harvard is telling us that these soft skills are the secret to success.

Technology that keeps us connected around tasks can also keep us connected around the gratitude, compassion, and self-care ideas we need to support ourselves when we’re not working as well. 

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Interested in how Cloud Concinnity® can make a difference for your team? Get in touch.

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