Many businesses, both big and small, use all-hands meetings to get everyone together. So it’s always good to have some all-hands meeting ideas on hand to ensure you’re making the most of yours.
All-hands enable organizations to share company updates, industry news, and future plans. For some businesses, these meetings are a regular occurrence, happening monthly or quarterly. For others, they’re yearly or intermittent depending on what’s happening.
Regardless of how often you hold your all-hands, they offer an opportunity to improve employee engagement and create a sense of belonging.
When employees are truly happy and feel like they belong in the workplace, they work harder and stay for longer. All-hands are just one way that you can make people feel like an important part of the team, no matter what their role is.
So, let’s take a look at some all-hands meeting ideas to create a more connected culture:
Change up the speakers
Hearing the same C-Suite executives talk every time can get repetitive for employees. Especially if you hold monthly all-hands meetings.
So why not give employees a chance instead?
Rather than the head of each department giving updates each month, rotate which employee shares a team’s updates. This gives them the chance to build their public speaking and leadership skills. It also shows you’re invested in their professional development—something which is increasingly important to employees.
Not to mention public speaking skills increase people’s confidence and can help them more easily articulate their thoughts.
Hold it at different times and locations
While holding a company-wide meeting at the same time may sound like a good idea so people know when to expect it, if every meeting is at 9am on the first Monday of the month, it excludes the same people. Meaning those team members feel less connected to the business and may not get the opportunity to ask their questions.
So if you held the meeting in the morning last time, consider doing it in the afternoon the next.
If you meet in person but have a distributed team, change which location you hold it at. Consider making it available online as well. That way it’s easier for people to attend whether they work in that office or not. It’s one of the easier all-hands meeting ideas that can offer a big payoff.
Make it accessible
If it’s a short update, or you have a global team, can you do the update online? Or take a hybrid approach?
This ensures people with disabilities don’t have to worry about travel arrangements, parents don’t have to pay for expensive care, and it’s not eating into employees’ time with their loved ones.
You could record the all-hands (whether it’s in-person or not), then create a replay for people who can’t watch live. This makes it accessible to everyone regardless of their time zone or working schedule.
If you decide to host it in-person or hybrid, make sure you choose an accessible venue.
It should have a working elevator, a plan in place for wheelchair users if there’s a fire, working toilets, parking and/or public transit links, and somewhere employees can get food and drink.
This ensures your employees can be at their best for the meeting.
To make things even more accessible, you can use Workrowd to centralize materials you want to share before or after the meeting. Any meeting information also becomes archived and easy to find, so everyone can quickly refer to it when needed.
Make it interactive
The more you involve employees, the less likely they are to tune out.
Sorry, but all-hands can be boring and repetitive. They may be interesting to managers , but you want employees to get value from them, too. This only happens if they feel valued and bought into the company mission.
So make sure to give employees the chance to ask questions about what’s happening in your business/industry. You could allow them to put executives on the spot, or give them the option to submit questions in advance.
Using Workrowd, you can make sessions more interactive, giving employees the chance to discuss the meeting before, during, and after on the meeting’s page.
Be open and honest with your employees and they’re more likely to reward you with their loyalty. Introducing more interactivity is one of the all-hands meeting ideas every organization should consider.
Send a reminder
With everything going on at work, it can be easy for employees to forget that an all-hands is even happening.
Sending a reminder can help keep it top of mind. This then means people are less likely to leave organizing travel, accommodation, or childcare to the last minute.
You can also use Workrowd to schedule and collect meeting RSVPs so you know who’s coming. Your team will then get automatic reminders as well. It puts some of the all-hands meeting ideas on autopilot, so you can focus on creating an even better experience.
Offer optional socializing and networking
While I disagree with mandatory workplace socializing, there is a place for optional socializing.
Whether this is going out for a meal, an activity, or a book club, giving employees the chance to hang out with their colleagues face-to-face and do something that isn’t work-related can help with collaboration and allow them to let off some steam.
Get feedback
If you want everyone in your company to pay attention to, and get the most from, an all-hands, you need to know how they feel about it.
Regularly soliciting feedback on the meetings’ format and usefulness ensures you can see what’s working and can act to continuously improve it.
To make your life even easier, Workrowd can automatically follow up with employees after your all-hands. You can collect employees’ feedback, then see the results in your automated analytics dashboard.
That way, you’ll know exactly what employees love—and aren’t so keen on—within your current format. It then makes it easy to improve on your all-hands meeting ideas for next time.
Conclusion
To get the most from company-wide meetings, you have to meet employees halfway.
All-hands aren’t just about you sharing company updates. They’re about finding out what your employees want and need from you going forward.
You can do that via a Q&A, or send a survey after the all-hands to find out what they think.
Changing up how and when you host all-hands meetings ensures they’re accessible to more people regardless of their location or circumstances.
Ready to take things to the next level with some of these all-hands meeting ideas? Workrowd’s all-in-one suite of tools can help.
Using our one-stop platform, you can easily keep everyone in the loop, encourage better discussions, and collect feedback on how your all-hands meeting ideas are working out.
Does this sound useful for your organization? If so, visit us online to learn more and see how Workrowd can help you build a more connected culture. Or, just send us a quick note at hello@workrowd.com to set up some time to chat.
