With today’s corporate landscape, it should come as no surprise that the need for good corporate governance is vital. With examples such as the collapse of construction giant Carillion or the Volkswagen diesel dupe scandal, there has never been a better time to shine the spotlight on organisations and demand for more accountability. When looking at this on the surface level corporate governance is essentially a set of rules which refers to the way in which companies are governed and what purposes they serve. This may seem an obvious statement to make however here at eShare we believe good governance starts at the top and we feel that there is always room for improvement when it comes to good governance.
Within a company, the board is the principal agent of risk-taking and enterprise, the principal maker of commercial and other judgements. Delegating these responsibilities means thinking not only about particular tasks but also about ways of working as a board and ensuring individual directors can be fully equipped to play their part. This combined with outlining and setting the business objectives can mean that many meetings can lose meaning rather quickly as a wave of duties and information is thrown towards board members, especially if that information is not properly documented or structure in a conducive manner. The key to better corporate governance lies within the working relationships between boards and managers, the dynamics of board interaction and the competence integrity and constructive involvement of directors. The building of a board itself is an ongoing process of continuous improvement, which in turn means boards must keep coming back to the same questions about purpose, resources and effectiveness.
However, even if boards have the best intentions to be diligent, this is not always an achievable aspiration. eShare research shows that transparency is not always optimal in UK businesses. Out of 1,000 employees, 39% could not name a member of the board at their company and 31% did not understand their company’s vision or values. Whilst board visibility isn’t a necessary requirement of a well-run board, it is perhaps indicative of wider problems regarding accountability and transparency of directors.
Not surprisingly, in the same survey, 79% cited that poor governance would be a disaster for their company. This figure highlights the greater awareness of governance across organisations, which can only be a good thing in the quest to improve. As with most things in life, it is only by acknowledging our shortcomings that true progress can be made, so why not go back to basics and improve how directors are meeting and how those meetings are run.
Alister Esam, founder of eShare says “no matter what the size of your organisations board , the need for every director to be fully prepared is imperative having access to the right information at the right time is how better decision’s are made and in my experience dramatically increases the chances of success for any business.”
Building a better board means providing the tools for board members that they need to do help them do their job effectively. That’s we created BoardPacks with the goal to help boards meeting run more efficiently and allow board members to have more accountability and transparency. With our governance tracking, feature boards can now track director attendance and also measure how diligent board members/committees are by tracking how often documents are opened and how long they have been opened for. The benefits of having your board documents available to you online or offline on your portable device are already well know but with directors leading such busy lives not many can afford the luxury to digest an entire document on the go. With our new document tracking feature you can now pick a document back up exactly where you left it last time and any unread documents are highlighted with a blue dot next to them in agenda view.
Alister concludes “Our board portal solution, BoardPacks, focuses on improving your boards governance and decision making potential, not just digitising your meetings, our clients across private, public and third sectors are all seeing the benefits of better and more engaged board members”,
If you would like more information and a free demonstration of BoardPacks to see the benefits it would bring to your board please contact us.
