Watch this webcast, where experts from Bank of America, Debevoise & Plimpton, and Russell Reynolds Associates discussed how boards are currently responding to the COVID-19 pandemic – and what they’ll need to focus on in the upcoming months.

Some of the insights included:

• Sustain a higher frequency of board communications and meetings. In the initial phase of the COVID-19 crisis, most of the companies we surveyed were communicating with their boards at least weekly. Consider keeping that up, or holding informal calls with your board members on a regular basis.

• Use your existing reporting and monitoring processes. As companies provide more information to the board, it’s probably a good idea to leverage your existing reporting and monitoring processes wherever possible. You may wish to add metrics, and you may want to consolidate information in a COVID-19-related dashboard, but you probably have robust processes in place to collect, verify, review, and report information to the board. You will want information going to the board related to COVID-19 and other crises to have the same degree of reliability.

• Ask your investors for their expectations in addressing social issues. It is easy, when you have a shareholder proposal on a topic such as diversity or equity, to focus on the shortcomings of the proposal itself. But it can pay real dividends to ask your investors, regardless of the language of the proposal, what they believe you should do on the topic being raised.

• Board diversity is an urgent topic now – and there are concrete steps companies can take. It’s helpful for boards to expand their aperture in the director search process to look not just for a sitting CEO or CFO, but rather for a “senior executive” who brings a set of skills and qualities that will make them an effective all-around member of the board. Boards that primarily rely on their existing networks of contacts when looking for a new director will likely find it harder to diversify.