The single most important thing a voluntary management committee does is meet together to make decisions. All business is carried out at meetings, and effective meetings should be well planned to ensure the effectiveness of the decision-making.

An agenda is a list of things to be done (a programme of business) and provides a running order  for the meeting. The agenda should be thought through in advance and is normally drafted by the Secretary in consultation with the Chairman before being circulated to the members of the committee in advance of the meeting, together with any other papers which may be required. In the meeting each item should be given the right amount of time according to whether it needs:

• A decision or;
• Further information required before a decision can be taken or;
• Discussion before a decision is taken

Convention

For a typical agenda the first two and the last two items will recur automatically on each agenda. ‘Apologies for Absence’ will be followed by ‘Minutes of the Last Meeting’, while the final two items will be ‘Any Other Business (AOB)’ and ‘Date of Next Meeting’. The chair may request AOB items to be notified in advance so she/he can keep to time.

Placed between these set opening and closing items are the other subjects which require the committee's attention. Many of these items will have been set by the Minutes of the previous meeting. It is almost certain that some action will have been decided upon at the last meeting and the members given the responsibility for that action must have the opportunity to report their progress.

In the interval between meetings, additional items for the next agenda will come to the notice of the Secretary. Members of the committee may ask for some topics to be included in the agenda. Others will occur to the Secretary in the course of the committee's work.

Order of Business

The order in which items come up for discussion will follow the agenda. Consequently care needs to be taken when planning the sequence of items. It is preferable to put items at the beginning of the agenda in the hope that they will be dealt with quickly and thus leave the remainder of the time for the topics requiring detailed discussion.

Matters Arising

It is fairly common practice to combine items for report under an umbrella heading entitled ‘Matters Arising from the Minutes’, and to place it third on the agenda. This item is probably responsible for a greater waste of time than any other. The sole purpose of Matters Arising is to tell Committee Members of developments arising out of previous business for which no provision has been made on the agenda. It is a reflection on the quality of the agenda if any points of substance are not listed in their own right, since this may force the chairman to work his or her way through the Minutes, item by item. Unless, therefore, it is strictly controlled, the Matters Arising procedure has three major disadvantages.

The first is psychological. If the initial part of the meeting has to be spent on a review of the circulated Minutes, many members will feel that they are merely retracing their steps. Members will, and rightly so, resent this as a waste of their time.

The second disadvantage is the procedural difficulty of separating reports on previous business from discussion of future actions and so getting entangled with later items on the agenda.

Thirdly, there is a strong likelihood that, human nature being what it is, a member may succumb to the temptation of trying to re-open discussion on an issue that has already been decided. 

Fitting It All In

In preparing the agenda, thought must be given to how long the meeting is likely to last and how much business can be done in the time available. It is unfair to the Committee Members, and to the work, to have to restrict discussion on items of importance which require thorough discussion, just because of the length of the agenda. It is also very bad practice to close the meeting leaving the agenda still unfinished, or being compelled to let the meeting run well past the accepted time when the meeting should end. This can result in members having to leave before the end and so disrupting the meeting. 

Setting Out The Agenda

All items on the agenda should be numbered consecutively. Where there are other papers required for any item on the agenda, it is important that they should be clearly identified showing their relation to the item. It is also important to show if they are enclosed with the agenda, to be circulated later or tabled at the meeting. Where an item on the agenda is being continued from a previous meeting, it is helpful to quote the Minute and date of that meeting. The presentation of papers in this way will make it easier for the committee to deal, in a business like manner, with the range of items before it.

Although most meetings feature some updating and information sharing, ultimately the aim of all meetings is to make decisions. Making decisions is critical to management committee effectiveness and in planning meetings, consideration must be given to what is needed before a decision can be made - is it further information? Agreement or consensus? Everyone needs to know why an item is on the agenda, and that a decision is needed.

Minutes
Minutes are a formal record of the meeting. They should be approved by all and signed off by the Chair at the beginning of the following meeting. They should be brief, highlighting action to be taken and decisions made. The Chair/Convener needs to indicate to and seek feedback from the minute taker on the exact nature of the record being made. Good minutes will record who has to do what by when, and copies should be sent to those affected.

Financial reporting is one agenda item that will appear at pre-set dates during the year and everyone on the committee should know these dates.