We define agile leadership as choosing to operate as a proactive, adaptive leader in a changing world. For many of us, that is the opposite of how we would define the experience of board work. For decades, board work has revolved around the recurring but episodic march of the board book and the board meeting. In between, there was little to do for board directors but wait for the next meeting.
Behind the scenes, board secretaries, committee chairs and administrative assistants often toiled away, laboriously collecting documents and research to include in the next board book. And there was always plenty of calling, emailing, begging and scrounging to get the documents needed and the long list of meetings scheduled. Everyone had their own method, and if some part of the process was forgotten, left undone or lost in the shuffle of positional turnover, it just meant more work for the new people to clean up the mess and rebuild the wheel.
No more wasting time.
Cloud Concinnity® makes things agile in a whole new way. Here’s how.
Out-of-the-Box Workflows
Workflow automation saves businesses huge amounts of time and frustration by organizing repeated tasks into their ideal sequence, creating consistency and efficiency while minimizing or eliminating the chance for error. In board work, activities like overseeing compensation, choosing new board members, or ensuring regulatory compliance all require the integration of data, conversations, and deadlines to make fully informed decisions — all coordinated between people who are all working remotely and infrequently. The repeatable nature of these tasks makes them ripe for automated workflows, yet we do not see proper utilization of this technology in today’s generation of board portals.
What we have done is create a suite of out-of-the-box workflows that automate common board tasks. For example, a board secretary who needs to assemble information for approval of release of earnings statements can gather all financial documents by simply pulling up the workflow and clicking “Start.” A pre-defined series of emails and alerts will go out to the relevant players, reminding them of what is needed, who needs it, and when it is due. Everyone is clear on everything and everyone has more time to make it happen.
Custom Workflows
We understand that every board is different and has its own approach to doing things. That’s why in addition to out of the box workflows we give our administrators the power to create their own workflows. Whatever the series of tasks it takes to prepare for a key board activity or bring on the next board director, Cloud Concinnity® will help lighten the administrative load.
For example, if your board is helping with the strategic planning for a business expansion and you want to gather feedback and gain consensus from an array of stakeholders along the way to approving elements of the expansion that gets reviewed by everyone on the board, you can easily create a workflow that alerts, reminds, and confirms that everyone has indeed seen and read the relevant information. Then and only then will the next steps initiate, making sure everyone is on the same page and contributing to a team-wide sense of urgency and action.
Best Practices
When there is a better way to do a task or a series of tasks, we’ll tell you. Because boards of directors face many shared regulations, they have many shared challenges. Unfortunately, there is a vacuum around the need for shared resources and best practices, and far too many boards are operating in the dark — and far below their capacity as a result.
We add best practices to our dashboard so every time a director logs in they are getting fresh knowledge. We add best practices advice to our workflow-builder so that no matter who is doing the building (or the upkeep) on a workflow, it can be polished and tweaked to always improve. Finally, we make our library of best practices resources available for challenges like HR, financial planning, and cyber-risk so that board directors can focus on how they want to tackle those challenges, not on the hours of research it takes to understand the key pillars of the solution.