Does your company hold all-employee meetings? Are they formal or informal? High-end productions or hastily pulled together? Fun and engaging or dry and dense?

All-employee meetings are a great way to engage your employees, whatever name you use for them. I prefer “all-hands”, with its sense of “all hands on deck”. The alternative “townhall” makes me think of angry local residents. As for “fireside chat”, I can’t get over the fact there’s usually no fire.

An all-hands meeting lets your employees:

see and hear from their leaders, which helps build trust
get a better understanding of the strategy, how well the company is doing and what’s required of them
understand what’s going on in other parts of the business, aiding collaboration
celebrate successes
feel part of something bigger
ask questions, submit ideas and air concerns

Face-to-face will always be the most powerful way to communicate. But, for most companies, getting everyone together isn’t practical. So, the next best thing is an online all-hands.

How you set up your all-hands is up to you. It could be fully remote, if that’s how your employees work. Or you could gather teams in offices to watch the all-hands together and plan a social event before or afterwards.

Here are some tips on how to host a good all-hands:

Hold them regularly

There’s a saying in our industry: “Comms you can set your watch by”, which is about making the timing of your communication predictable. You could hold your all-hands quarterly, monthly or weekly — just make it consistent.

My sweet spot for a company-wide all-hands is monthly. It’s frequent enough to keep people updated but not so frequent you’re working on them all the time.

Weekly is a great frequency for a team or department all-hands.

2. Template your agenda

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel with each all-hands. You can run the same agenda, which allows people to know what they’re getting and makes it easier to plan. What you include is up to you but a typical all-hands might include:

Welcome from the CEO or host
Company update including performance metrics, client wins, product launches, industry news, new partnerships, project updates
Department/team highlights, showcasing a different team each time
Interviews or panels to highlight a product launch or mark a special occasion such as International Women’s Day
Employee recognition, including stories, shout-outs, awards and anniversaries
Q&A, with questions posed live or pre-submitted
Close and feedback on the event

To keep people interested, your all-hands shouldn’t be more than an hour long.

3. Use stories, keep each section short and ban bullet points

To avoid a boring all-hands that has people switching off, keep each session short.

Also, encourage your speakers to tell stories. Avoid dense decks — instead, only use slides for images, facts, charts and headlines. Don’t let presenters read out bullet point lists. Or display cluttered slides with a font size no one can read. Ban all jargon.

Ideally, you’ll prep each speaker and do a run-through beforehand, if possible.

4. Let your talent shine

In every company I’ve worked at, we’ve had people who could have been talk show hosts or news anchors in another life. Find those people and let them host your all-hands.

Avoid having the same leader each time, and use the occasion as an opportunity to spotlight talent from across the company.

The same goes for your presenters. Don’t just use your leadership team or the usual suspects. Highlighting a project? Showcase someone who’s delivering the work, rather than the project lead.

5. Make it interactive

There might be a temptation to control your all-hands and avoid interaction, but the best all-hands meetings give employees a say.

There are various ways you can do this — from inviting people to submit questions in advance via Slack to encouraging live questions through the chat function. You can also use a tool like Slido for polls and upvoting of popular questions.

6. Don’t disappear when there’s bad news

It can be tempting to delay an all-hands or switch off questions when there’s bad news. But this is likely to only make matters worse.

If you stop communicating when there's a challenging message, people will fill in the gaps.

If you’ve got some difficult news, tackle it at your all-hands first, where your employees can hear directly from their leaders.

7. Always get feedback

Don’t plan your all-hands events in a vacuum. Get feedback on them — and use that information to improve.

It could be a quick exit poll at the end of the all-hands or a short survey that goes out immediately afterwards.

My favourite? Call people and ask them what they thought. If each member of your comms team calls five people after every all-hands, you’ll get some great qualitative feedback.

This type of feedback also makes you invaluable to leaders, as you’ll have your ear to the ground and know things they don’t.

If you need help getting an all-hands off the ground or want some fresh ideas, get in touch.

All-hands meetings: what, why, when and how

Hold them regularly