I spent a large chunk of Wednesday in two meetings held by videoconferencing. I’ve done a bit of this before but this is the first time I have had to chair such a meeting with around a dozen people present – it’s quite hard work. But, we’ll all have to get used to it and it is certainly a way of maintaining contact without contact. It may be one of the things that we become so accustomed to doing over the next few months that few will want to go back to the olden days (of a few weeks ago) when people got on trains to travel to meetings.
The two meetings were both associated with the World Land Trust – the meeting I chaired was a trustees’ meeting – not the first I’ve chaired, but the first I’ve chaired as Chair of Trustees.
Now I certainly won’t go into details of the meeting but I suspect it was similar in some ways to many other meetings being held across the country in small businesses and in charities. We spent some time talking about strategy – a new organisational strategy which is planned to be developed this year. We spent some time on important but in some ways routine decision-making. And we spent time hearing about the impact of coronavirus on the staff and the work of the World Land Trust including our partner organisations abroad.
The WLT office is closed but the staff are working at home, pretty efficiently, but not without logistical difficulties. Our staff are safe and well at the moment. We can already see that 2020 income will be hit after a very good year in 2019. This isn’t surprising, all wildlife charities I know have noticed a big drop in income and nobody expects that to end very soon. The WLT works with partner oganisations across the world, particularly in central and South America, but elsewhere too and we are concerned about how our friends and colleagues are faring at this time.
None of that should be a surprise to anyone, and similar things are happening in other NGOs with whom we are in touch. This period will be a test of management and leadership from the Prime Minister to small teams and your favourite wildlife conservation organisation is in the mix there somewhere.
Here is a link to the World Land Trust statement on coronavirus.
Just on a personal note – it was a pretty good meeting. The trustee team is very strong and the senior management team is certainly all pulling together and have addressed the challenges very well so far. And in the meeting, we occasionally laughed but we would quite have liked to go to the pub afterwards as we normally do. It’s a good team.
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Does videoconferencing pose any challenges for whoever is taking the meeting minutes? Sometimes the sound quality is not of the best.
James – it does, unless the Chair is good at summing up. It’s usually best if the minute-taker drafts the minutes in advance!
Record the conference and then use voice recognition to convert the file to text. Probably.
Thanks Mark – that sounds like a very useful tip!
Put the notes/minutes on a shared (Google, Office i365, etc.) doc and let everyone add notes and comments.
On a video call it’s easy to loose some details, audio dropping out, everybody talking at once etc. so preparing a summary together gets everybody on the same page.
It really is amazing how resistant people can be to change. Whilst accepting home VC may not becquite up to a professional standard, I was using video conferencing very successfully 15 years ago – it seemed a bit of a no brainer when running an organisation notable for being remotely scattered.