How often should a registered society hold Executive Committee Meetings?

If your non-profit organisation is a registered society, meaning, a society registered with the Registry of Societies (“ROS”) under the Societies Act, 1966 (“Act”), then a specific set of rules and regulations governs some  aspects of its day-to-day operations.

One of these rules, is the obligation to hold regular executive committee (“Exco”) meetings.

Ok to start off, who exactly is the Exco? The Exco, is another way of describing the office bearers (pegawai pertubuhan) of your registered society. They are sometimes referred to as AJK, or Ahli Jawatankuasa. Essentially,these would be the President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer and ordinary executive committee members, that were elected at an Annual General Meeting.

So now, let’s first find out where the information as to how often the Exco should meet, can be found.

While there are general provisions applicable to the office bearers of a registered society under the Act, specific information on when the exco should meet, is actually set out in the Constitution of the registered society and not in the Act itself. 

As mentioned in an earlier post, every registered society needs to have a Constitution. You (or the Secretary of your non-profit organisation) would have had to submit the draft constitution, to ROS for approval prior to receiving your society’s Certificate of Registration.

A sample Constitution is available for download on ROS’ website. 

Assuming your Constitution roughly follows the ROS sample, you should find the following Article or its equivalent (note that a Constitution can also be in English, it does not have to be in Bahasa Malaysia) in it:

Jawatankuasa hendaklah bermesyuarat sekurang-kurangnya sekali dalam 3 bulan.  Notis bagi tiap-tiap mesyuarat hendaklah diberikan kepada ahli jawatankuasa 7 hari terlebih dahulu. Pengerusi dengan bersendirian atau tidak kurang daripada .....orang ahli Jawatankuasa bersama-sama boleh memanggil supaya diadakan mesyuarat Jawatankuasa pada bila-bila masa.  Sekurang-kurangnya setengah (½) daripada bilangan ahli Jawatankuasa hendaklah hadir bagi mengesahkan perjalanan dan mencukupkan korum mesyuarat.

A rough translation of the above:

The Exco must meet at least once in 3 months. Notice of the meeting should be given to the Exco members 7 days prior. The President alone or not fewer than [         ] exco members together can requisition an Exco meeting at any time. At least half of the number of Exco members must be present to verify the proceedings and fulfill quorum requirements.

OK, so you now know that the exco meeting should be held at least once every 3 months. Which means you could convene a more frequently if you’d like to. In our non-profit organisation, I try to convene exco meetings at least once a month. This does not always happen due to the busy schedules of all the committee members, but we try to follow this best practice.

What should you before an exco meeting? Best to prepare a notice of meeting and circulate it to all committee members 7 days prior. The notice would contain a brief agenda for the meeting.  Usually it goes along these lines…Presidents Report, Treasurer’s Report, Secretary’s Report, Special Business, Any Other Business, etc. The exact format is up to you – if your organisation is small, things don’t really have to be super-formal at the early stages.

If there are papers and documents that the exco members need to review, these could be PDF’d and emailed to all in advance to minimise time spent going through them during the meeting (a guaranteed time-waster! J)

It’s a good idea to prepare an attendance list, and get the signatures of the meeting attendees. This is just in case at a later date, a question arises as to how many people actually attended the meeting.

If you are the Secretary, then will have to pay attention right through and take minutes of the meeting ( so yes, it’s definitely not the time to be playing Pokemon GO! J). There are a couple of ways to take minutes. At the most basic level, you could just jot down notes on a sheet of paper and type them up later. This is probably the most effective, especially if people are talking very quickly and it’s difficult to keep up.

If however, you are a very fast typist and are more comfortable on a keyboard, you might want to prepare a standard template for minutes in soft copy by creating a set of standard headings corresponding to the agenda items set out in the notice of meeting, and add columns to fill in the notes of what was actually discussed during the meeting itself. This allows you to easily organise the notes you are taking during the meeting, into what will become the actual minutes of the meeting. It also skips the rather tedious part of having to type up your notes.

Yet another option is to record the whole meeting and then transcribe it line by line. Be warned though this is an extremely tedious taks… especially if you are just a volunteer, and have a full time job elsewhere! The likelihood that you’ll actually have the timeto sit down and transcribe an hours’ worth of recorded conversation, is pretty low.. and if the meeting drags on, you might just never finish transcribing the minutes J.

OK so once the minutes are typed up, we’re done right? Ooops, not so fast J. There’s still a couple of things left to do. First, the final minutes should be printed out, signed by the Secretary, PDF’d and emailed to all members. The printed copy should also be filed.

And last but definitely not least, make a list of post-meeting action items which need to be followed up on, circulate it to the task leaders and follow up on their progress before the next meeting. Otherwise,  action items discussed at the meeting are likely to remain in the minutes, never to be implemented J.

Comments, questions or suggestions, email me at spiral1701@gmail.com.