Whether you love, hate, or tolerate your monthly HOA board meetings, attending them is a big part of your role as a board member. In theory, everyone wants an efficient meeting, but sometimes things just don’t go as planned.
As an experienced Optimum community manager, I know how valuable your time is, and I know that a productive meeting benefits everyone. Here are my tips:
1) Identify what’s causing the slowdown
It might sound obvious, but sometimes, a bunch of small issues are at fault, rather than one big one. For example:
- Are you delving into minutia?
- Should certain topics be discussed on another forum?
- Are one or two board members derailing the meeting?
Talk to your Community Manager about your concerns. Ideally, he or she will have seen it all before and can help guide you.
2) Stick to the Agenda
Again, seems simple, but sometimes people have private agendas or topics they bring up at the last minute.
Your Community Manager should email the group ahead of time with the agenda and ask for any additional feedback. Then, if someone brings up a new subject at the meeting, you can politely tell them to table it until the next meeting.
3) Keep up the Pace
Diving down a rabbit hole on even one topic can push you into expensive overtime.
Agree to take long conversations off-line, or postpone them until the next session. If you need to create a sub-committee or assign due-diligence to someone, that’s much better than paying for overtime.
4) Create a plan for dealing with difficult people
Let’s face it, occasionally (or often), you have an uncooperative board member. Your Community Manager should be trained to deal with conflict, but you can help by being politely direct. Here is a quick plan:
- Listen and let them talk for 1-3 minutes.
- Summarize so they know they are being heard.
- Create a list of next steps.
- Tell them you are moving to the next topic.
5) Rely on your Community Manager
If you have chosen your management company well, they will have trained managers who can navigate these complexities.
And that’s where Optimum can help! We have some of the most-highly trained Community Managers in the business.
We pick our Community Managers based on: experience, project management skills, people skills, and dedication to the customer. Then we train, train, train with ongoing education.
Call or email us today to learn more about Optimum!
