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MG Corporation Board Director Teddy Carlton and former CEO Franklin Gaffney, MG Board meeting, Kununurra. Image, Wayne Quilliam.
Do meetings rule you or do you rule meetings?
It is common to hear community members and leaders of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations complaining about meeting ‘burnout’. Even in small communities, the daily round of multiple meetings convened by agencies, consultants, government departments, non-government organisations, politicians and representative organisations can be staggering.
To get the most out of meetings that are important to you, it pays to make sure you take charge and know how to run meetings the way you want. This is where rules can help you.
Effective meetings need: proper notice, a quorum, a clear agenda, plain language briefing papers, minutes, an action update, good facilitation and to follow agreed procedures.
An organisation’s meetings are a fundamental part of the governance process. But there are some common problems, such as:
So people get frustrated, bored and the meeting doesn’t accomplish much.
Good meetings don’t just happen. A well-run meeting needs:
There are many different kinds of meetings and ways of running them. The focus in this section is specifically on the meetings of an organisation’s governing body.
Every incorporated organisation needs to hold an annual general meeting (AGM). In this video, WYDAC managers explain the various steps and rules that must be followed before and during the annual general meeting.
We have provided a simple set of related templates that you can customise and use to run your governing body meetings.
The templates and tips are:
You can adapt this template to suit your circumstances and needs. It allows time at meetings for members of the governing body to individually provide feedback on events and updates on issues raised by people in their community or nation.
This resource provides some tips on procedures and questions to ask before making decisions and a template for recording decisions made at meetings.
It is not enough for a governing body to make good decisions. You need to make sure they are implemented.
It is your responsibility to keep track of whether your decisions have been implemented or not, and to ensure you are regularly updated with that imformation at your meetings.
But legal rules usually don’t tell you how to actually put the behaviour into practice. So it’s important for every governing body to develop its own customised rules for how its members meet and work together.
Every individual on the governing body should understand the meeting rules and know how to follow them. This should be included in regular governance and induction training.
There is a lot of technical lingo used about meeting rules and procedures. Here are some tips to make sense of it.
You can customise your meeting rules to cover:
The chairperson
The chairperson’s role is an important one. They are ‘in charge’ of running the meeting and ensuring that:
When an experienced, confident chair runs a meeting things seem to run smoothly and the chairperson is hardly noticed. When a meeting is poorly chaired, everyone notices and everyone suffers.
Your agenda
Your agenda is like your roadmap—it shows you where you are headed in the meeting, and so helps you to stay on track. It is usually sent out ahead of the meeting and you can add items to it. Sometimes there are information papers about different items on the agenda.
It’s important to make sure there is always time allotted on the agenda (this is called a ‘standing item’) for individual members of the governing body to give feedback about relevant issues raised by their community or nation.
A quorum
For the meeting of an incorporated governing body or an annual general meeting to be official, there must be enough members present to make it legal. This is referred to as a quorum. The number of people needed differs from one organisation to the next and is usually set out in an organisation’s constitution and rules.
The quorum must be present during the whole meeting. If a quorum is lost during the meeting, then decisions cannot be made. People can continue to discuss issues and share information, but they cannot make official decisions.
So it is important that members attend meetings or give notice if they can’t attend.
It is also a good idea to have a hard copy of the organisation’s constitution and meeting rules available at each meeting.
For corporations registered with ORIC, the CATSI Act adopts a model for quorums that states how many people make up a quorum depending on how many members the corporation has:
| Members | Quorum members |
| 20 or fewer members | two members |
| 21 to 30 members | three members |
| 31 to 40 members | four members |
| 41 to 50 members | five members |
| 51 to 60 members | six members |
| 61 to 70 members | seven members |
| 71 to 80 members | eight members |
| 81 to 90 members | nine members |
| 91 members or more | 10 members |
Your minutes
Your minutes are the written record of the discussions, decisions, recommendations and actions proposed at your meeting.
An incorporated governing body must keep minutes of all its meetings—it’s the law. These days it is also a good idea for any informal community organisation to keep a written record of its collective decisions.
Meeting minutes don’t need to be long and wordy. The best minutes are:
This template is an example of how the minutes of meetings can be recorded. You can adapt it to use at your own governing body meetings.
A motion
A motion is a proposal or idea for potential action or decision. ‘Moving’ a motion simply means someone puts the proposal forward to be voted on. Usually this is written down. Then people vote on it.
‘Voting’ can in fact be done in many different ways—for example, by a show of hands, verbal comment, secret ballot, consensus or a counted vote.
There are many complicated technical processes for passing motions and making decisions. Increasingly, organisations are using consensus approaches to making decisions and recording the result.
Whichever approach you chose, the important thing is that you set it down in your rules, so everyone knows how you go about making decisions and incoming new members can learn what to do.
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