All-hands meetings are an important time to bring the whole company together, provide important updates, and hopefully have a little fun. Enhance your next all-hands meeting with these great tips and insightful questions.
The goal of an all-hands meeting
Company-wide meetings can either be a great tool for collaboration or a deterrent to a team’s productivity. Between one-on-ones, team scrums, and client updates, you might find yourself spending more of your day in meetings than doing actual work. So why add an all-hands meeting to everyone’s agenda?
When done correctly, all-hands meetings can be a great way to provide insight into what’s happening company-wide, answer questions or concerns from your employees, and share about what everyone’s working on. Here are a few reasons why all-hands meetings matter:
- They provide transparency on topics you don’t talk about every day
- They provide an opportunity to share business updates
- You can take time to celebrate milestones and recognize the people that made them happen
- They help align everyone on company objectives
- They help build team spirit
- They give everyone the chance to speak up
- They give remote teams the chance to connect with the C-Suite and HR. The more people you can have gathered together (whether in-person or virtually), the better.
These are just a few of the reasons why your company will benefit from having regular all-hands meetings. The cadence will depend on the unique needs of your organization, but you could start with having a quarterly all-hands meeting to discuss the previous quarter’s progress.
How to make the most out of your all-hands meeting
If you see value in the idea of regular all-hands meetings, great! Now let’s look at some ways to make the most out of your next all-hands meeting:
- Consolidate the deck – Most of us are visual learners, so if you have slides, make sure to keep them short, visual, and sweet. Many public speakers recommend having less than 10 words per slide (you can expand during your presentation).
- Create a master deck – With so many teams adding updates, you want to make sure you’re updating the most recent deck. Cloud storage services like Google Slides make it easy.
- Involve remote teams – Designate someone at HQ to speak for remote teams (we have designated remote advocates at Poll Everywhere). Make sure to involve them in questions and interactive feedback, as well.
- Keep each section short – We all want to hear about team updates, but we also don’t want the all-hands meeting to last forever. Limit each section (for example, each team gets two slides).
- Gauge what your team wants to hear about – We go into more detail below, but make sure your presentation covers the points that your team cares about. Poll Everywhere offers ways to anonymously gather team feedback, making it easy to figure out what topics really matter to them. Have fun – Add some fun elements into your all-hands meeting, such as a raffle, a friendly competition, or a game. Your coworkers will be engaged if there’s a gift card on the line!
Insightful questions to ask before, during, and after your all-hands meeting
The best way to keep your team engaged during your next all-hands meeting is to make sure you’re covering points that they want to discuss. Here are some questions to ask that you can address during the meeting:
- What went well last quarter?
- How could we have improved last quarter?
- What projects are you most proud of?
- Name a team member that went above and beyond expectations
These are great talking points to discuss during the meeting. By sending out a survey before the meeting, you can discover the topics that matter. But that’s not all. Using Poll Everywhere, you can actually ask questions during the meeting to really gauge audience feedback. Here are a few examples:
- What was your favorite moment last quarter?
- What’s one word to describe how you felt last quarter?
- What is a suggestion you have for next quarter?
Using multiple-choice options, colorful word clouds, and even competitions, you can elicit employee feedback and make your all-hands meeting a solution-oriented, two-way conversation.
After the meeting, make sure to send out a survey to gauge how well it went and if what you covered was useful. The survey could be as simple as asking “what did you like and not like about this meeting?” or as in-depth as you want. Gathering feedback will only help you improve your next all-hands meeting.
All-hands meetings are a great way to bring the whole team together to discuss company updates, celebrate wins, and have a little fun. Make your next meeting better by encouraging audience feedback and participation, involving the whole team, and covering pertinent topics. Learn more about how to make your next all-hands meeting an engaging conversation here.