The 5 Tips for Terrific Town Halls
Recently I spoke with a founder friend of mine who expressed their frustration about the lack of engagement in their all-staff meeting. I asked them to explain the structure and content of the meeting, so that I could gain a better understanding for what they might be missing. They described the following:
Cadence: Bi-weekly on Mondays.
Purpose: Alignment opportunity for the entire remote team.
Work Content: Company updates and whatever was relevant from the previous 2 weeks.
Social Content: None
Team Collaboration: Q/A at the end with request for questions in advance.
Consistency: Fairly regular, but has been canceled a few times for lack of content.
They went on to explain that they knew, as it was, this was an unsuccessful meeting. They felt their key issue was there was no one owning content creation, which left the meeting feeling unplanned and unnecessary.
I agreed with them that this was an obvious contributor, but it was only the tip of the iceberg. In order to resurrect this meeting from experience purgatory, they were going to have to make some serious adjustments.
This conversation inspired this week’s post…
The 5 Tips for Terrific Town Halls
1. Intentional Scheduling
First and foremost your meeting needs to feel intentional and organized. Your teams will only take it as seriously as you do, so lead the charge. Achieve this in the following ways:
Set a realistic cadence: An all-company meeting should occur monthly. Anything more frequent than that loses its value. They should also be on the same day in that month. For example, the 4th Monday of each month. This allows ample time for thoughtful content creation and people to adjust schedules to attend.
Stay consistent: Never cancel the meeting, just bump it. Outright canceling an All-hands sends the message that it’s not important; that you’re prioritizing other events over this one. This will inevitably affect the attendance and engagement at future events. If you have a conflict, just bump the meeting to a different day, preferably in the same week. Expert tip: A leader being out is not a good reason to bump/cancel an All-Hands. Their attendance shouldn’t dictate its importance. As they say “the show must go on.”
Have an agenda: Agendas ensure there is a clear purpose to your meeting. (And we all know how I feel about purpose. 😄) It also ensures that your teams can plan accordingly. Maybe if they have a conflicting event, and they know the parts of the meeting they need to attend, they can make adjustments to be there for them.
Calendar invite: Create a company events calendar and send out your invite from there instead of your personal one. That way admins can modify it in your absence and staff have all the information they need to attend each month. This might seem pretty obvious to most, but you’d be surprised how many companies skip this part. Expert tip: Create a full company email alias to make scheduling full-staff events and meetings much easier.
2. Collaborative Work Content
I can’t tell you how much I despise one-sided all-hands meetings. What I mean by one-sided is the same leader, with the same script, reading off boring slides, asking for questions they never get, then wrapping the call as soon as possible. 🤦You just blew a golden connection opportunity! Why even call it an all-hands, it clearly has nothing to do with them.
I’m not suggesting leadership not give important updates at these meetings. I’m simply saying there's a better, more engaging way to deliver this information. All-hands should be collaborative. A chance for leadership to inform and align on company objectives, and the team to share their work and achievements. It’s a vital tool in connecting the team to each other and the culture. Here’s a few ways you can do this:
Start an All-Hands chat: Depending on the messaging platform you use, create a room dedicated to all-hands content creation. It should be a public forum where any team member can feel welcome to pitch an idea for the upcoming agenda.
Encourage collaboration: If you hear about an exciting project or team event, reach out to the team manager to see if they would be willing to share details on the next all-hands. Expert tip: If it’s their 1st time presenting, offer to assist them in whatever way they need. Having a positive sharing experience will make them more likely to step up in the future.
Create a spotlight segment: If you don’t have anyone volunteering to present you could choose a team and spotlight an achievement for them. Sometimes a little surprise recognition is nice.
Hire a guest speaker: It can be a great touch to hire someone to speak on a topic that’s relevant to the team that month. For example: Maybe you’re about to reach a stock vesting date. Hire an investment expert to educate the team on how to properly handle their accounts and investment options.
3. Social Content
In addition to collaborative work content you should have engaging social content as well. For example, if you’re a smaller team just starting to build your connective tissue, you could have a segment called “2 Truths and a Lie.” Each month you spotlight 2 different employees in this mini-game. It’s a fun, quick way for people to get to know teammates they don’t interact with on a daily basis.
Introduction of social content is also an excellent way for leadership to connect with the team. In a lot of companies I have worked for, engaging with leadership can be daunting for many team members. Having the leaders participate in the social segments evens the playing field. It will make leadership feel more approachable and the team feel more comfortable to open up.
I like to start my all-hands meetings with the social content. Not only does it set a friendly, warm tone for the meeting, but I find people are more engaged in the work segments that follow. Here are some ideas for social content for your meetings.
Work anniversary acknowledgements: Town Halls are a great opportunity to recognize annual work anniversaries. This small acknowledgment of their commitment has a big impact on their connection. Expert tip: Consider giving something to mark the occasion. A small memento that everyone receives each year creates a feeling of appreciation and belonging.
Promotion announcements: If you have any significant promotions in the month, it can be nice to give that public recognition.
New hire introductions: Have new hires for that month introduce themselves. It’s puts a face with a name for the team and makes a new hire feel warmly welcomed.
Life event recognition: Take time to recognize events like new family members, birthdays, engagements, marriages etc.
Quick non-awkward icebreaker questions: To kickoff the call ask one random icebreaker question. Ex: “What’s the best thing that happened to you this month?” Have everyone add their answers to the chat. Select the top 3 answers to highlight for the group. Expert tip: Call out any similarities in responses. If two or three people had similar answers it can be cool to acknowledge it. You never know… it may inspire them to connect. 💡
4. Choose an Emcee
Think about your favorite movie…You love the story, identify with the characters, connect with dialogue, everything about it speaks to you. Now imagine that movie with your least favorite actor in the lead role. You think it would still be your favorite?
Probably not. That’s because delivery matters.
It’s the same with leading large meetings. A good host can make even the most boring presentation feel interesting and engaging. I’ve been on a number of calls where the session leader was uncomfortable, nervous, and obviously counting the seconds till the nightmare is over. It kills the experience for everyone involved.
Which is why I wholeheartedly believe you should hand-pick an emcee for your full staff meetings. Someone who is warm, energetic, confident and skilled at leading conversations. It’s important that they know how to keep the content moving, fill awkward silences and don’t get frazzled with the occasional tech hiccup. Mark my words, make this small change and you’ll see an immediate improvement in your staff’s attendance and engagement.
5. Create a History
You’re doing all this intentional agenda planning, creating amazing work and social content, and investing an incredible amount of time in making sure this is a first class experience…Don’t you want all that work to be preserved?
Yes! Yes, you do. 👏
That will only happen if you have a place where everything lives. Working agendas, past agendas, recordings, pictures, video etc.
Even though I’m biased, the best tool I ever used for creating this history was Trello.
Here’s why:
Organization: The lists were the agendas for the town halls. The card in each list was a different content segment in the agenda. The lists were all clearly dated in the header, with the most recent Town Hall at the front of the board. Having this organized and easily navigated format ensured we never repeated content, and we were always keeping things fresh and current.
Collaborative: Every team member had access to the board. They were able to comment on the cards, leave reactions on segments they loved, or copy specific content to share on other boards.
Visually Impactful: With the ability to add pictures, gifs and memes to card fronts, every agenda told a story. I’ll never go back to boring, bulleted word docs again. 😆
Transparent: Since we built the agenda in real time, anyone on the team was able to see what we were planning for the month.
Efficient: With Trello custom fields we were able to allot a time frame to each segment. This allowed us to efficiently estimate how long the Town Hall would be. We could cut down presentations to make sure we didn’t exceed our hour or create a natural end to the meeting on low content days.
Cultural Impact: It became a testament to the value we place on our culture. New Trellists could review it and gain valuable context for the company, while Trello OG’s could look back and be proud of how far we’ve come.
Even though I would recommend Trello for this purpose, it’s not about the tool you use. Whether it’s Monday, Asana, Notion, Confluence…the takeaway here is to make sure to create that historical resource for your teams.
I leave you with this…
My founder friend’s all-staff meeting troubles were not uncommon. Unfortunately, I’ve participated in many meetings “that could’ve been an email.” Some of you probably went to one today. Even though it can be frustrating you have to keep in mind that organizing any meeting is well-intentioned. In most cases the person planning it genuinely wants to create a connection opportunity, they’re just a little lost on how to do that. Lucky for them, you follow Gather with LL. Send them my way, I’ll be happy to give them directions.
