Best practices for organizing your SEC meetings

Definition of SEC Meetings

According to the official website of the French government, the Social and Economic Committee (SEC) is defined as follows: The SEC replaces the elected representatives of the personnel in the company. It merges all the staff representative bodies, staff delegates, works council, and health, safety, and working conditions committee. *

The SEC must be set up in all the companies concerned by January 1st at the latest.

How many SEC meetings must be held?

Depending on the size of the company, the number of meetings of the SEC is established by collective agreement. The SEC must meet at least six times a year, four of which must be devoted to subjects relating to health, safety, and working conditions.

The SEC shall hold a meeting:

• At least once a month in companies with less than 50 employees
• At least once every 2 months in companies with less than 300 employees
• At least once a month in companies with more than 300 employees

Who are the participants of the SEC?

• The employer or his representative
• Members of the staff delegation or their substitutes
• Guests such as workplace doctors, CARSAT agents, etc.

How to make the agenda of the SEC

The agenda of the SEC is an obligation that must be prepared by the secretary, previously elected at the first meeting of the SEC, and the employer or his representative. 

On the agenda, you must indicate these items:

• Basic information: date, time, place, and names of all participants and alternates.
• The role of the participants: leader (the secretary of the meeting and employer), partners i.e. those who are responsible for a topic, and the participants.
• The topics to be discussed with responsible for each topic and objective(s) (inform, exchange, generate ideas, consult or decide)
  • the detailed questions that must be discussed in the meeting
  • the consultations required by regulation or collective agreement
• Attach important documents

Approval of the agenda

In the case of an SEC, the subjects on the agenda must have been discussed beforehand during a preparatory meeting for example. Once a consensus has been reached and the subjects or questions have been determined, the agenda that has been proposed cannot be changed (wording and order of subjects).

Communication of the agenda

The agenda is communicated to all participants and substitutes by the chairman of the SEC, at least 3 days before the meeting so that they are well prepared for the SEC meetings.

During the SEC meetings

To simplify the drafting task, an audio recording of the SEC meetings can be an interesting option.

For the success of the meeting, it is important to do the following:

• Approval of previous minutes
• Document your topics, and decisions with effective note-taking
• Assign tasks for follow-up action: who it is for, prioritization, and due date.
• Resolutions must be voted on by a majority of members present.

Effective note-taking during the meeting reduces the time needed to write the minutes by 80%.

The SEC meetings minutes

The minutes are a document that serves to summarize what is said in a meeting, by subject. It is commonly used in the meetings of the SEC (11 to 50 employees).

The minutes of the SEC must include:

• The basic information of the agenda: date, time, and place
• Participants, absentees, and alternates
• A summary of the deliberations and agreements, if any, and the primary objective of each item discussed:
• Decisions are taken if any.
• Attach any necessary documents, images, or web addresses.
• Indicate the actions to be taken
• Detail the tasks: To whom they have been assigned, the priority level, the due date, and the status of the task (in progress, completed, etc.)
• Date and location of the next meeting.

The minutes are an exact transcript of the meeting which serves as an official document in case of dispute or disagreement. They have legal value.

The minutes contain precisely the decisions taken since they have been submitted and adopted by the approval of the members of the SEC and signed by the secretary. To be in conformity, you could add an audio recording of the meeting to your minutes!

What is the deadline for sending the minutes?

The minutes must be sent within 15 days of the meeting. If a meeting must be held within this time frame, the minutes must be sent before the meeting. Send the minutes by email to all participants or use a meeting management tool to centralize all your minutes.

What are the advantages of using an SEC meeting management tool?

A meeting management tool such as Beenote helps you manage your SEC meetings in a structured way. With little time to prepare and organize your meetings, Beenote is the perfect tool to simplify your task!

Here are some Beenote features that will make your ESC meetings a success!

• Beenote offers a predefined agenda and minutes structure that allows for duplication and recurrence from one meeting to the next. A lot of writing time will be saved. Invite your colleagues to collaborate in writing!

• Your meetings are automatically added to your corporate calendar: Beenote is integrated with Microsoft 365 or Google Calendar. Basic integration for other emails.

• Document your meetings: topics, decisions, and actions to be taken will be detailed in the minutes and easily searchable in the minute’s directory.

• All your meeting documents are available at any time for consultation, with the latest version of the documents: agenda, minutes, audio recording, decisions taken, topics, and tasks. Information can easily be searched by keyword.

• Your meetings in real-time: Stay on topic and keep your meetings on schedule with the built-in timer. You can even record your conversations for future reference or easy minute-taking.

• The assignment of tasks is done directly in the meeting and the follow-up is done from your dashboard. The recurrence of tasks is done from one meeting to another to be kept informed of the actions that have been started until their completion.

• The digital format of the tool allows the considerable reduction of paper and you will no longer need to physically store the documents.

• Documents are stored securely and are not accessible to non-team members for greater confidentiality.

If you have additional questions about SEC meetings and what Beenote could bring to your meetings, please contact us, or request a demo.