Tips For Successful Virtual Board Meetings

By Kelly G. Richardson, Esq. CCAL, HOA Homefront Column 

Civil Code 4926 permits 100% virtual meetings as an alternative to solely in-person or hybrid board meeting formats. Here are some ideas your board may wish to consider as you update your HOA’s written meeting rules. 

Platforms: There are many virtual meeting software platforms available: (Read reviews to compare the various choices): Dialpad, Google Meet, GoTo Meeting, RingCentral, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, Zoho Meeting, and Zoom are some popular alternatives.

Remember: All votes in fully virtual board meetings require roll call vote, meaning that each director’s name is called and their vote announced and included in the minutes. Board meetings at which ballots are to be counted may not be purely virtual. Membership meetings are not permitted to be virtual.

Who’s There: Require that participants identify themselves in meetings, listing their names and addresses. Those unwilling to confirm their membership should be excluded.

Members Only: Only HOA members have the right to attend board meetings. The rules should reiterate this to prevent someone from giving the meeting link to a tenant, Realtor®, or someone else not entitled to attend HOA board meetings.

We See You: Participants should be required to have their cameras on, which helps confirm their identity and right to attend. Also, consider banning visual displays by an attendee of anything other than the participant’s location – visual message displays, inappropriate background material, distracting behavior, or inappropriate attire should not be permitted. 

We Hear You (and Don’t Want To): Participants should be muted unless they are called upon to speak, so set up the virtual meeting so that all participants are automatically muted and only the meeting administrator/host can unmute attendees.

What You Say Won’t Be Used Against You: Make it clear that virtual meetings will not be recorded and that the HOA does not consent to making recordings from the virtual broadcast. Members should not be subjected to the pressure that their comments might be recorded and shared with others. The bottom line is that recordings should not be permitted. Remember, HOAs are neighborhoods, not public agencies, and the board members are not politicians but unpaid neighborhood volunteers. They shouldn’t need to be trained to deliberately and carefully choose every word – that’s what lawyers are trained to do. So, just as with live meetings, prohibit any kind of audio or video recording. Disable or eject AI chatbots. 

No Chat Please: People often write things in a chat that they wouldn’t say out loud in a meeting. That can create some obvious issues (and conflict) in a community. Since homeowners aren’t allowed to argue back and forth during live meetings, the same rule should apply to meeting chats. So, consider a policy that the chat box will be disabled. Open forum should be oral, not through chat notes.

Pardon The Interruption: A policy should make it clear that, just as with live meetings, someone disrupting the meeting or otherwise violating the written rules will be warned and then will be removed from the meeting.

Adopt written meeting rules to embody these policies, to ensure your virtual board meetings will be productive.

I am sure there are policies I haven’t considered for virtual meetings – Let me know!

If your HOA pursues purely virtual board meetings, make them an asset for your community, not merely a convenience.