Process is powerful.
Year after year and boardroom after boardroom, we see that smart, repeatable processes are what separate great leadership teams from the good ones.
And at no other time of the year is that more obvious than annual meeting time.
Every spring brings week after week of documents, research, signatures, and checklists that zap time, money, and resources from administrative personnel. For Board Secretaries, GC’s, CFOs and their teams, it is a season of late nights, countless emails, and chasing executives down to dot the required “i’s” and cross the required “t’s.”
But it doesn’t have to be so hard.
Here are 6 Ways Cloud Concinnity® can Transform the Annual Meeting Process
Slash the time spent on outreach by hosting everyone’s documents and all related communications in one place. Imagine how much more easily and quickly things could come together if all of the documents and their related communications, signatures and due dates were securely stored together in the cloud and easily accessible. No more email inboxes. No more text messages. No more voicemails. No more misunderstandings. It’s all there, every time you log in.
Simply update information (like the D&O Questionnaire) rather than starting over every year. Instead of spending hours hunting people down to fill out forms and information that everyone is too busy to spend time on, Cloud Concinnity® stores that information. Fill it out once and it gets stored in a shared database. Instead of starting over each year, simply nudge the right people to update their information and everyone spends a fraction of the time (and a fraction of the bother) to get it handled.
Eliminate mistakes and reduce variability with automated workflows. Imagine the peace of mind knowing that every step in your annual meeting process was happening exactly how you need it to happen, and exactly the same way every year. Cloud Concinnity® comes pre-loaded with a set of standard “starter” workflows that bundle frequently associated tasks together. For example, if you need sign offs on a particular document in advance of the meeting, there’s a workflow for that. Need to automate your own check lists and processes in Cloud Concinnity®? No problem. Design custom workflows that will go off like clockwork and can be updated as needed.
Easily meet SEC compliance requirements in advance. With Cloud Concinnity®, every deadline and draft distribution is created automatically via customizable workflows, reducing the last minute crunch as filing deadlines loom. No more endless gathering. Everything is gathered and logged in a searchable database as they happen.
Have safe conversations with a centralized system. On top of tying together communications and related documents, tasks and deadlines in one place, communicating in Cloud Concinnity® is safer than email, text and most other tools. We’ve built a layer of our own security on top of everything so that communication on Cloud Concinnity® is as secure as it gets, which we know is critical for sensitive materials like the annual report, proxy and annual meeting conversations.
Build on established communication patterns with your board members. This is the elephant in the boardroom that no one talks enough about — communication. When it’s good, it’s good. When it’s bad, things take what feels like forever. One of the most powerful aspects of Cloud Concinnity® is that it offers everyone on the senior leadership and boardroom team a single, secure hub for communicating about board matters. When everyone gets used to doing that all year, annual meeting tasks will be part of a smooth system — not another thing nagging everyone in their email inbox.
Process is indeed powerful, and building the great processes and communication habits that will make next year’s annual meeting smooth sailing can start now. If you ignore the annual meeting until next spring, it’s going to hurt just as bad next year. But if you use annual meeting “off season” to get smarter technology in place, the next year will feel like a breath of fresh air.