5 tips to run a successful Strata meeting
General Meetings and Committee meetings are an extremely powerful tool to assist running a building complex seamlessly and improve stakeholder satisfaction. Unfortunately, these meetings are, at times, seen as “time wasters” or “poorly run with no follow-up” resulting in low attendance.
If it’s your responsibility to facilitate the next meeting, we recommend you take into consideration the following so you can run a successful meeting that everyone wants to attend:
1. Send advance notice via your communication platform
Legislation states you are required to provide notice of the meeting, following the “Clear Days Notice” rule. This means there must be at least 7 days clear notice plus allowing time for postage if the notice is being mailed. [1]
To reach attendees quicker you can send out a calendar invitation and email and/or write it on your building’s online communication dashboard. Your notice must include the minutes of the previous meeting unless they had already received a copy.
We suggest using a platform to communicate with all stakeholders to ensure transparency, access to information and open communication. Using a dashboard feature means:
Your meeting notice will be received in an instant
Attendees will have 24/7 access to the invite and previous minutes
Any updates and meeting reminders, fortnightly and day before can be easily communicated.
2. Write an agenda
It’s rare to have productive discussions with vague intentions. A meeting will consist of motions, poll voting, and rules you need to meet with regards to quorums, proxy votes and meeting minutes.
By preparing an agenda, you have a guideline and checklist for your meeting, which means you will have more structured and people are more likely to stay focused and find the value in attending.
Once your notice is sent out, people may send in requests for motions, you will also need to add these onto the agenda.
To ensure you have visited everything on your checklist, visit Fair Trading NSW which will provide you with detailed guidelines.
3. Manage the meeting by the clock
An effective meeting is one where you watch the clock. Every minute counts during a meeting, if you’re careless with the time, you may miss out on covering off everything on the agenda.
Tips:
Start the meeting on time and once a quorum is achieved. A quorum for any General Meetings is when:
at least 1/4 of the people eligible to vote attend in person or by proxy
ORa sufficient number of owners eligible to vote and holding in total 1/4 or more of the scheme’s total unit entitlement attend
ORa minimum of at least 2 persons eligible to vote attend in person or by proxy
Arrange a ‘timekeeper’ who will guide you on timing during the meeting
If too much time is spent on one motion, as the chairperson, you can call a poll vote to determine a resolution.
4. Take detail meeting minutes
Multiple things will be said and promised throughout a meeting; by taking notes, you record any questions, tasks or assignments that have been directed to you or others.
If you’re Chairman facilitating the meeting, appoint someone to take full and accurate minutes of any General or Committee meeting. Here is how:
Provide them with a copy of the agenda so they can use it to guide their note-taking.
Provide them with a brief of how you would like the notes to be taken – are there any specific topics that are more important to capture the information than others i.e. any voting?
In addition, the minutes must include the:
Date
Time
Location
Names of lot owners present
Text of all resolutions
Names of proxies present
Outcomes of on any voting on resolutions.
Names of lot owners who have provided proxies
5. Send the minutes out ASAP
The best practice is to send a follow-up email to all attendees with the meeting minutes as soon as possible.
Basically, your email should summarise what was spoken about and any tasks to be completed, by who and a due date. We suggest you send your email out the following day, however you do have up until 14 days to send each member of the Strata Committee along with each owner of the strata scheme.
A follow-up email shows your professionalism and ability to communicate with your committee and other stakeholders. Lastly, it keeps everyone accountable for their responsibilities going forward and you can have a historical record of what was said and done in each meeting.
Bonus tip:
Where do you store all of the information relating to your building or community committee? Meeting minutes, action items, contact details and what’s happened in the last 12 months?
Meeting minutes and any correspondence is an asset to your committee and the building as a community, therefore if you aren’t already you should consider storing all of this information on a secure cloud-based platform designed for strata communities. Any piece of information can go straight into the platform so that people don’t need to chase up the committee.
Your information will be protected, accessible anywhere you are at any time and transparent to all stakeholders.