A “boardroom” is the meeting place for a company’s top executives. The term “boardroom” can also refer to a conference or meeting room. There are a wide variety of meetings and trainings that take place in a company’s boardroom. A boardroom at a large company may be spacious, with plenty of natural light and a scenic outlook.
Even in large corporations, a small boardroom may not have windows. There may be more than one boardroom at your company, and you may need to reserve one in advance. Each meeting space in the board has its own table and seats. Some boardrooms include seating for only six people, while others can accommodate fourteen people or more.
Even in more intimate boardroom settings, it is uncommon to find unupholstered or unprotected wooden seats. Tables for conferences might be round or square for smaller rooms, or rectangular or oval for more spacious boardrooms.
A boardroom table can be made in the shape of a U or have a removable middle portion to accommodate various pieces of training and video conferencing hardware.
Contents
What Is a Boardroom?
Meetings of a company’s board of directors, or those individuals chosen by the company’s shareholders to oversee management, take place in a boardroom.
The term “boardroom” can also be used to describe a meeting area in a stock brokerage firm, as it is commonly used in the investment banking sector. Here they can consult with RRs about their portfolios, get stock quotes, and make trades.
How a Boardroom Is Used
The number of times a board of directors convenes in a given period of time is contingent on a number of factors unique to each company’s industry and size. Members of the board should meet in a designated boardroom at least once every quarter.
In order to fulfill their fiduciary duty to the company’s shareholders, the board of directors will meet regularly to debate and resolve the most pressing issues affecting the business.
The board of directors is responsible for making decisions on matters such as executive salary, dividends, and options. As a whole, the board is accountable for assisting the organization in establishing broad goals, providing backing for executive responsibilities, and guaranteeing that sufficient, well-managed resources are available.
Boardroom Requirements
Decisions made at board meetings can have far-reaching effects on not only the company’s employees and shareholders but also the economy as a whole. Although crucial decisions are made in these spaces, the rooms themselves need not be extravagant.
Even while they aren’t required for meetings to take place, many modern boardrooms feature cutting-edge technology like Bloomberg terminals or other sophisticated quoting systems. In addition, the boardroom may feature large-screen televisions and other presentation devices.
Virtual Boardrooms
The use of online conference rooms (or “virtual boardrooms”) is on the rise. There are a lot of advantages to holding board meetings online. To start, it’s evident that board members appreciate the convenience of online meetings.
They make it possible for everyone to routinely participate in meetings no matter where they happen to be located. An online board meeting allows members to participate from anywhere, including their living rooms, offices, or even airplanes.
The time and money saved from not having to go nearly as often is substantial. Also, it has a dramatic impact on attendance rates. Due to the ease of participation, all board members are able to participate in virtual board meetings.
Portrait of the Female Director
Our research revealed a number of clear trends. Female board members averaged a few years younger than their male counterparts, which is likely due to the fact that women only started serving on boards recently.
Sixty-eight percent of women on boards were in operational roles, compared to 69% of men, and 68% were in lead roles like CEO, president, or partner, compared to 51% of men. These results imply that women may need to be more accomplished than men to be invited to boards.
They also disprove the notion that women on boards typically have administrative or clerical skills. Another difference we found between male and female board members was that women tended to come from private rather than public companies.
It’s possible that the fact that fewer women work in the C-suites of public companies explains why the majority of male board members also had jobs at private corporations.
Conclusion
Women have been advocating for years for more opportunities to serve on business boards. Even more commonly, boards state they would like to increase diversity. Nonetheless, in 2012, only 16.6% of board seats at the Fortune 500 companies were held by women.
And according to data from the research firm Catalyst, why has that percentage been largely steady over the past six years, increasing by just two points? In Europe in particular, people’s patience is starting to wear thin.
Some nations, including Belgium, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain, and the Netherlands, have passed laws mandating a minimum percentage of female directors on boards after seeing little progress with voluntary efforts. The European Union is also thinking about enforcing quotas.
