Elly Yates-Roberts |
Norwegian grocer Coop Norge has held its general assembly on Microsoft Teams as a virtual meeting for the first time in its history, enabled by third-party application Decisions.
The cooperative is legally obligated to have general assemblies with its nearly 100 delegates, requiring it to hold the meeting during the Covid-19 pandemic. Decisions for Microsoft Teams enabled the creation of a structured agenda, meeting minutes templates, and automated task and decision follow-up. The solution also introduced the capability for secured voting, which allowed for the counting of votes from each cooperative, as well as a hand raise feature that would provide and organised speaker list.
“General Assemblies are very formal meetings that last four to six hours,” said Frode Ander, senior technology advisor for Coop. “It is crucially important that we follow our processes to the letter and that we maintain all formal steps necessary for operational control. “We were initially introduced to Decisions CEO Jørgen Solberg in late March and within days we were able to set up the solution and prepare for the General Assembly, which was only weeks away.”
Coop will now continue to use the application to manage voting and coordinate speakers in future meetings, even after the return of in-person events. It is also looking to expand the use of Microsoft Teams and Decisions in its executive and board meetings, which have their own specific structures and requirements.
“We are impressed with the effort Decisions put into helping us successfully run our General Assembly virtually for the first time,” said Ander. “Our internal team was able to work alongside Decisions to test and customise the modules we needed over dozens of hours of collaboration.”