Governance

September 26, 2023 Published by Eastern Ontario Chapter - By Steve Christison

An Engineer’s Perspective on Meetings

From the Volume 35 issue of the CCI Eastern Ontario Condo Contact Magazine

For many people, it has been just over 3 years since they attended their first online Zoom meeting. Those early days were a mixture of people learning where the mute button was, hiding the fact that you were not wearing real pants and, at least in my case, finding out that I was balding because the web camera provided a different angle of the top of my head that I never really noticed before.

Everyone can agree that those early days were challenging; however, it required us to look at new ways to meet and discuss the running of a Condominium Corporation and by forcing us to get away from the old methods, it has made us find a better way to do business.

Prior to the pandemic, almost all board meetings I attended were either completed in person or on the rare occasion, a conference call. These meetings almost exclusively occurred during the evening in either the common room of the building or in a Board member’s unit and would involve the engineer providing the Board with a summary of their report, a discussion of a construction project, or the nuances of their Reserve Fund Study. While some business could occur to move projects ahead, most meetings consisted of the engineer receiving the Board’s comments and then providing new information to the Board at a later date. Due to the limitation of the available technology, these meetings were more commonly information meetings than a meeting where real business could be completed.

Once we were forced online, the advantages of this model very quickly became apparent. The benefit that was noticed almost immediately was the flexibility in scheduling that this model provided. One of a property managers’ biggest challenges is trying to coordinate 5 to 6 people’s schedules, and this becomes even more difficult if your community and your Board is made of a group of people in different stages of their life. When Board meetings were exclusively in person, the Board would generally meet once per month and would attempt to get through all of that month’s business in that time. If the Board invited a guest to that meeting, it involved coordinating an additional person’s time and could cause a several month delay on business because of the attempt to coordinate another person.

The flexibility of online removed many of these hurdles. While coordinating multiple people is still difficult, the removal of the time it takes to travel to a specific location greatly increases the availability of most. While the majority of the Corporation’s business still occurred at these larger monthly meetings, more pressing business that previously would need to take an hour to hour and a half out of someone’s day could now be performed in a smaller 15 to 30 minutes online call. Further, since no one had to travel to a specific location, anyone who was to attend the meeting could attend from wherever their current location was. I have personally had a meeting where I was taking the call from my office, several Board members were in a common room at the building, one board member was in Florida, and another was in Spain.

Travel time also has a large cost associated with it that may not be known to Board members. When attending a meeting, a professional will generally charge for the time they take to get to the meeting as well as the time to get back (and the chit-chat and extended introductions and hand shakes). In many cases, the cost of travel of the meeting will exceed the cost of the meeting itself. The Corporation saved several hundred dollars by simply having the meeting online instead of in person.

Online meetings have also caused a substantial shift in the way we as professionals have presented to Boards. Previously the preparation for in-person meetings would consist of providing the Board with a version of our report prior to the meeting and then printing out handouts of specific items we wished to discuss in more detail with the Board. The meeting itself would generally only focus on the handouts provided by the engineer at the meeting as several Board members did not have a way to print the earlier provided documents and the engineer would take notes about the Board’s comments and requests. Changes to the report would then be made by the engineer in the coming days after the meeting where they would then send a revised report to the Board which would not be discussed again until the time of the next Board meeting where the Board again would have new comments which would have to be forwarded back to the engineer for changes to the report and which the changes would not be reviewed again to their next Board meeting. Even pressing business such as determining the next year’s budget would take several months, as modifications to the reserve fund study were only being made and reviewed once per month. Because of these timeframes, many Boards found themselves in a situation where they are setting the next years reserve fund contribution based on draft reserve fund study where the recommended funding plan was still in flux.

Even prior to the pandemic, the industry knew this method was inefficient and were looking at alternative ways to present the information. Meetings were beginning to be held more commonly in Board Rooms or other common rooms where reports could be projected onto a shared screen and therefore more real time changes could be performed. Instead of the Board being expected to print documents out before the meeting, the report could be projected onto the screen and be discussed in a more directed fashion. For Reserve Fund Studies, different funding plans could be examined in real time and in many cases a funding plan could be determined prior to leaving the meeting.

By projecting our reports on a shared screen, we were able to make the meetings much more efficient; however, as the engineer, there still remained several issues that would lead to a shortened but inconclusive meetings. While we could now make semi-real-time changes to the report, we were still only limited to the information that was brought to the meeting which generally was only a working copy of the report. While discussions during these meetings could commonly turn to other projects going on at the complex or finer details within the discussed report, visual representations of these items could not be presented since the engineer did not have access to it.

Online meetings brought the next level of projecting to a common screen with the use of screen share. Screen sharing is the ability for a presenter to show their screen to the other people within the meeting while being able to still review other information on other display monitors. While similar to projecting your screen onto a board room screen or projector, having the screen closer to the participants made for easier viewing and more directed conversation. Further it allows the presenter to be able to multi-task during the presentation by being able to display the pertinent information to the participants while having easy access to supplemental information on other displays.

The biggest advantage to the online screen sharing model to the projection in a common space model is the engineer has full access to all of their information they have on the file and potentially on the building. While previously at in person meetings, you may speak about a specific problem, the engineer was generally limited to what they prepared for the meeting. Specific photos or background information was generally limited to what was referenced within the report and could be shown on the common screen. With screen sharing and having access to online servers, the engineer has full access to their entire company information. Information can also pass in the reverse direction as Board members or Property Managers might have additional information concerning ongoing issues within the Corporation that they can easily pass to the engineer during the meeting.

With the ability to pass more detailed information back and forth in a real time, discussions during the meeting become much more directed to issues that are impacting the Corporation at that time. Further, being able to provide backing information during the meeting allows for even more real-time changes to reports as many times the impacts of the new information can be evaluated during the meeting instead of having the delays of sending it after the meeting and the correspondence that comes with that.

There will always remain cases where an in person meeting will be more appropriate; however, for the vast majority of the Corporation meetings with consultants, online meetings will result in more efficient and informative meetings. In the words of the most famous engineer, Leonardo Davinci, “Virtual Presentations for Reserve Fund Studies Are here to Stay, And That’s Not a Bad Thing”.

Steve Christison, P.Eng. Building Condition Assessment Practice Lead