Too many e-mails

I'm the board president for my assocation.

We are a thriving association. Parks are looking good. Projects are moving forward. Homeowners are happy and not complaining about dues because they see money being spent in the community. From the homeowner prespective, all is good.

However, board members are complaining that they are receiving too many e-mails. Some want to be e-mailed just once per week, not throughout the week.

What techniques have you found to reduce e-mail traffic yet still run a thriving organization? It seems that everyone e-mails a lot these days so I am unsure offhand how to limit e-mail traffic without hurting our performance as an association.

We have a $274,000 operating budget for 274 single family homes.

Who are the emails from and what are they about?

Call a meeting to make a decision about the landscape contract and reserve study.

Whoever is the most interested in National Night Out should be given a budget and the authority to plan it.

I don't disagree.

If the MC is doing homeowner communication, accounting, contracts, but you're doing 90% of the work, what is the MC doing?

Are you doing 90% of the work, because that is what you want, or is it because the other won't get involved. If it's what you want, maybe the others don't want all the enmails because the decision is not in their hands, but yours. Maybe you're just keeping them in the loop, but maybe they don't want to be.

Take Barbara's advice, s*** or get off the pot. Instead of tlk, talk, talk, take action and move forward.

This is what I am leaning to covering at our next meeting. The other board members are adults and should know that they can respond to e-mails at their convenience. One board member asked me to e-mail just once per week, and I don't think I can accomodate because this is outside the norm for using e-mail. I'd rather they just setup a separate HOA Board only email account and check that weekly, or use their regular account and automatically move everything to folder as you suggested, and check that when they can.

They are volunteers and it's fine with me if they don't read their e-mails every minute of every day.

Our property manager has suggested that folks setup a HOA-specific e-mail account so they can receive e-mails in a dedicated location, and then check that as they want, as a manner to help control the impact of board business on personal lives. I think I will share this with the other members.

Definitely discuss, because they're being ridiculous. They want you to spend even more of your time to composed a special combined email every week because they won't manage their emails. I also agree with the separate email account like Gmail since it avoids needing a separate folder. And they can just let the email sit on the server until they're ready to read it - they don't have send it to their phones or computers automatically and get interrupted by the notification sounds.

I hope Henry wWILL tell us about their board meetings How often & my other questions.

also, Henry: it's just not clear (at least to me): are most of these emails between & among dire tors? Or are a lot of them form residents?

Henry

Using Email to discuss/navigate business can make for short BOD Meeting but for quite a few back and forth Emails. Pick you poison.

It is not working well for your HOA if you're thumbing your noses against state statutes. Why do you think it's OK for your board to act outside the law? Don't you believe that owners should be able to hear and see the Board deliberate, discuss, debate & vote? It sounds like you're basically holding secret board meetings online.

What DO AZ statutes say about this, Henry?

I disagree. Henry indicated that he is the one who generates 90% of the emails and each Board Member receives up to 10-20 emails per week. If the BOD meets monthly, then that's 36-72 emails generated only by Henry each month. That is definitely too many emails. I'd venture to say that many of them are probably unnecessary in the grand scheme which makes it difficult to keep up with and filter to figure out which ones are important and necessary.

While it is possible to tell the rest of the Board that they need to figure out ways to accommodate, prioritize, and track the emails . . . the root cause of the issue is Henry himself sending too many emails either caused by or somewhat related to a significant imbalance of Board/Officer workload.

And it's definitely too many emails if you are looking for responses and/or other activity to occur as a result of your emails. One cannot keep up with your emails, accomplish activity as a result of your emails, be part of back-and-forth discussion among all Board Members, and live their personal lives all simultaneously. Your expectations are unrealistic. And I doubt you would be satisfied if other Board Members would only look at and respond to emails once a week or month.

I think the overall issue starts and ends with you, Henry, that you simply send too many emails and expect too much. I understand you are likely passionate about your HOA, take pride in getting stuff done, and perhaps have the free time to accomplish all of that. But others on your Board likely do not. You need to figure out how to tone things down (while not losing the passion that you have), but also be more realistic in what you expect out of others. And you need to help ease the burden by not generating so many emails and so much activity for things that likely do not necessitate that many emails.

Is Henry complying with the Az statute section on this:


§ 10-3821 • ACTION WITHOUT MEETING
Unless the articles of incorporation or bylaws provide otherwise, action
required or permitted by chapters 24 through 40 of this title to be taken at
a directors’ meeting may be taken without a meeting if the action is taken
by all of the directors. The action must be evidenced by one or more written
consents describing the action taken, signed by each director and included
in the minutes filed with the corporate records reflecting the action taken.
B. Action taken under this section is effective when the last director signs the
consent, unless the consent specifies a different effective date.
C. The consent signed under this section has the effect of a meeting vote and
may be described as such in any document.
D. Any director may revoke a consent by delivering a signed revocation of the
consent to the president or secretary before the date the last director signs
the consent.
E. For the purposes of this section, a consent may be signed using an electronic
signature as defined in § 44-7002.

?

Granted he and his fellow directors likely do not care.

For the archives, to help all the little people who might wander onto HOAtalk.com because there board is conducting business in secret:

Arizona Statute§ 33-1804 • OPEN MEETINGS; EXCEPTIONS
A. Notwithstanding any provision in the declaration, bylaws or other documents
to the contrary, all meetings of the members’ association and the board
of directors, and any regularly scheduled committee meetings, are open
to all members of the association or any person designated by a member
in writing as the member’s representative and all members or designated
representatives so desiring shall be permitted to attend and speak at an
appropriate time during the deliberations and proceedings. The board may
place reasonable time restrictions on those persons speaking during the
meeting but shall permit a member or member’s designated representative
to speak once after the board has discussed a specific agenda item but
before the board takes formal action on that item in addition to any other
opportunities to speak. The board shall provide for a reasonable number of
persons to speak on each side of an issue. Persons attending may audiotape
or videotape those portions of the meetings of the board of directors and
meetings of the members that are open. The board of directors of the
association shall not require advance notice of the audiotaping or videotaping
and may adopt reasonable rules governing the audiotaping and videotaping
of open portions of the meetings of the board and the membership, but such
rules shall not preclude such audiotaping or videotaping by those attending,
unless the board audiotapes or videotapes the meeting and makes the
unedited audiotapes or videotapes available to members on request without
restrictions on its use as evidence in any dispute resolution process. Any
portion of a meeting may be closed only if that closed portion of the meeting
is limited to consideration of one or more of the following: [snip; look up the rest

Henry

You have just been called out. Welcome to the forum.

The thing is, this is how Henry's board decided to conduct business. If you impose an arbitrary limit on the number of emails, then you'll very likely cut short discussion. (My state, FWIW, allows us to conduct business via email but the board must be unanimous and decisions must be documented in minutes. If not, discussion has to be moved to an in-person meeting.)

On the other hand, if Arizona says the same thing about minutes, then somebody (Secy?) needs to summarize the week's/month's motions and votes, so I guess it wouldn't be so terrible if the summary was expanded and e-mailed to all board members.

But I still don't know how you have an email discussion without a lot of emails flying back and forth - it's a consequence of doing business that way.

Our Board receives a tentative agenda for a board meeting about 10 days in advance. The owners receive the final agenda about fives days in advance of the Board meeting. All of our meetings are held on zoom for any resident to listen to and may participate when Homeowner input item is up.

Hi Henry,

There's nothing wrong about your percentage of involvement being 90% of the overall board activity. What you might be misinterpreting is your board colleagues' desire for engagement at the levels you're communicating via email.

There are some good tidbits on this thread....here's my two-cents.

1. Make sure the items you're emailing 20 messages per week about are thoroughly discussed among the board at regular business meetings.
2. At those meetings, make your intentions clear as to how you're going to work on their requests to bring results back to the next meeting.
3. Bring results back to the next meeting.
4. Rinse, repeat. On more-urgent projects, call more meetings....when times are slow, don't meet as much.
5. Prepare projects a bit more independently and keep the board informed at a "high altitude" level (weekly email, for instance)

My hunch is that you're trusted to handle board affairs so that the directors can make meaningful decisions at meetings....the by-product is that they don't want to hear every detail or receive many questions before time to meet as a group.

Just back off a bit, align the reports for the board. Give them good information about what's been accomplished and keep 'em out of the weeds. Sounds to me like you're doing a good job.

I didn’t see this suggested: Henry, have you considered some kind of email digest? I don’t know your software environment, but various packages (MS Teams, for instance) appear to have provisions for setting up email digests - ie, a week’s worth / day’s worth of email messages, all in one email message. Email listserv tools tend to offer this, too - a person subscribes, and they can choose between receiving individual emails or (say) a daily digest. It’s not good for active discussion, but it can work well for people who’re just monitoring the discussion.

I’m going to guess you might be in one of those situations where yeah, everyone says “Henry sends out too many emails!” - but God forbid you slip up and *don’t* send an item out: “hey, what’re you trying to hide?!”

Bill