The digitalization of corporate communication is happening – more slowly for some and more surely for others. Digital solutions mean that executives can connect and collaborate in real time from anywhere in the world. Ridding meetings of paper saves time for executive meeting organizers but also participants, with the added environmental bonus of saving more than a few trees and reducing carbon emissions.

“One of our clients used to have paper meetings and the agenda was in a document of almost 200 pages,” recalls Jesse Thiel, Regional Sales Director, Diligent Luxembourg.  “Whenever there was a change, you had to find the specific pages, make the edits and then reprint the pages and redistribute amongst the board. It was such a hassle for anyone coordinating and preparing the meeting.”

One source of truth

“Manual and paper processes were being phased out in any case, but the Covid-19 pandemic has certainly sped it up,” highlights Jesse Thiel. Many digital alternatives have risen over the years to provide solutions geared towards corporate secretaries and board administrators. Among these are board portals, software tools that allow the board of directors, executives and management team to communicate, collaborate and exchange information. The core advantages of a portal are that it is time-saving and serves as a collaboration tool: it facilitates interaction among leaders and everyone can share notes within the portal in real time.  

“Being all digital, a board portal enables you to make changes directly, everyone in the meeting gets a notification of a change, plus you can assign action points to people there and then,” explains Jesse Thiel. In this sense, the portal helps to streamline Board communication because it provides one source of truth. Board support teams are always looking how to save time while managing meetings as effectively and securely as possible.

Keep pace, save time, stay secure

Gone is the necessity of relying on courier services or insecure email for distribution. Within the platform, all documents can be securely imported and shared to selected meeting attendees. Participants are informed when new documents are uploaded, and it is simple to implement any changes or notes within and give direct feedback.

Taking minutes within the minutes module becomes far more efficient and overall everything runs faster and smoother. It really eases the burden of administrative staff as it enables them to assign tasks immediately. “Usually you would take the minutes, put everything in a Word document, create an action plan, involve all the right people. This can all be done during the meeting, and so everything goes way faster and the meeting coordinator who is able to save a lot of time in the follow up as well as in the meeting preparation,” underlines Jesse Thiel.

Above all, the Diligent Board portal is very safe and secure. All data is encrypted, and Diligent regularly invites external audits: “We invite hackers to attack our system to ensure high level security across our tools,” explains Jesse Thiel. Users can also benefit from Diligent’s personalized customer service, available 24/7, every day of the year, in your language of choice.  

Take Modern Governance best practices to the next level with and go fully paperless in your management meetings to keep pace, save time, and stay secure.