Board calendars set out all regularly scheduled Board of directors and standing committee meetings. They are prepared anywhere from 1 to three or even 4 years in advance.
A good practice would be to fit all the meetings on a single page. I enclose the form of calendar I use.
Preparing the calendar and achieving consensus is one of the most tedious and frustrating things I have to do. Making the document easy to understand at a glance contributes to easing the pain by making it easy for all concerned to understand.
Also, the board calendar often drives other business calendars within the larger enterprise since the board is naturally situated at the apex of the organization. For this reason, the distribution list for the calendar goes beyond the board of directors and the corporate secretary’s office to include the CFO’s and contollers’ staff, as well as the chief planning or strategy officer or equivalent. In some cases the board calendar is posted to the corporate intranet to facilitate planning for other departments departments as well, though that is not presently the case for my company.
Another document that is key to the Board’s work is the work program which drives off the Board charter and allocates the subjects that the Board must deal with each year. Generally that document is set up as a matrix with subjects down one side, planned meetings across the top and Xs in the squares indicating subjects to be covered in each meeting. It is helpful to provide a column indicating the section of the Board or committee charter that supports the item in question.
Example
