How To Run an Effective All Hands Meeting
You Can Be Anything But Boring
One of the most important rituals in a startup is the all-hands meeting. This is when you gather all the employees in the company, whether in person or via video, and pontificate about the future. Ok, maybe that’s how all-hands meetings go in some companies, but that’s not what you’re aiming for. A properly run all-hands meeting provides direction and leadership to the team and gets them excited about the mission.
There are obvious occasions to have an all-hands meeting, such as when you are about to launch a new product, have raised new funding or undertake a change in strategy. But all-hands meetings shouldn’t just be for special occasions.
In most cases, once a company has passed the implicit culture hive mind of about a dozen people, you need to spend more time communicating. The all-hands meeting can be an effective way of making sure everyone is up-to-date with the latest progress and priorities.
You should hold these meetings at least quarterly, and for early stage companies with a rapid pace of change, a more frequent cadence can be helpful to keep everyone aligned.
If you’ve ever wondered why people are off strategy, not quite doing what you hoped or making sub-optimal decisions, it could be that as things have evolved, the latest strategy updates or priorities are not making their way to all employees. There can be a lag time in communications or, like a game of telephone, the message is garbled as it gets passed through second or third-hand.
A well run all-hands meeting is an amplifier of leadership. It gets everyone on the same page, hearing from the leaders of the company (whether executives or not) and addressing the hard issues.
Repeat The Message
You may find yourself repeating the same messages in every meeting, but in a growing company, it’s better for people to hear the priorities too often than not often enough. You’ve got to repeat the key messages over and over again. In marketing, there’s an adage that it takes seven impressions before someone will buy from you. Why would your employees be any different? Just because you’ve sweated over the quarterly objectives and priorities don’t assume that everyone else has absorbed them.
Another important element of the all-hands meeting is it enables you to demonstrate and celebrate the company values.
At Gatsby, we ran the all-hands meeting every two weeks for 60 minutes. The exact agenda would rotate depending on where we were in the quarter and what was going on, but it included topics such as:
Welcome of new employees to the company
Celebration of internal promotions
Employee nominated peers demonstrating one of our core values
Demonstration of new features in development
Upcoming product launch plans and marketing campaigns
Celebration of a major new customer win or expansion
Recap of an executive or departmental offsite
Analysis of customer satisfaction trends
Feedback from and Q&A with customers
End of quarter results against goals
New goals for the new quarter
Update on funding strategy
HR topics such as benefits programs, reviews, etc.
As you can see, there’s no dearth of topics can be covered in the all-hands meeting. Often the challenge was keeping the meeting to 60 minutes. (Yes, we frequently ran over time.) Even during the toughest times, the all-hands meetings always provided more energy than it took.
The most important thing to consider is how to keep your audience engaged. If you’re conducting the all-hands meeting remote over video, you’re already at a disadvantage. Presentations can be informative, creative, challenging, inspiring or silly —but they can’t be boring!
We were fortunate at Gatsby that our VP of Operations, Maddie Wolfe, was the host and emcee of the all-hands meeting. Even during the worst times of the Covid lockdown, she kept the meeting lively and interesting.
In any rapidly growing organization, there is way more going on than can be covered in a single meeting. I have found it helpful to have a deep dive (15-20 minutes) on one or two topics in each meeting, rotating regularly between different departments and speakers.
Starring Individual Contributors and Customers
Even though there are other many ways to disseminate information, when properly run, the all-hands meeting has a number of benefits. Employees hear updates directly from those involved. They can ask questions to help them understand how to apply changes in strategy. And they are excited to see the work of their teammates and colleagues get recognition.
In case that last point isn’t totally clear, make sure that the all-hands meetings include presentations from individual contributors and frontline managers, not just executives. Let’s face it, after you’ve heard from a third random executive in the company, most people are tuning out. But when a peer is presenting work that they’ve been involved with, they are hanging on every word. That’s how you build audience engagement.
The other thing that can be helpful is to pull in customers. People never tire of learning how customers are using your product or service in the real world. Sales and customer success teams can also be quite effective in sharing customer stories. Customer stories often have far more impact in shaping the culture and focus of your company than any top-level mandates.
Sometimes when difficult topics are being addressed, there can be a reluctance to allowing audience questions. Personally, I’ve always appreciated people who ask the hard questions of management. That said, I’m not in favor of anonymous questions since they lack accountability and hinder constructive dialogue.
When someone does ask a hard question, there are likely others who have the same question but were uncertain how the question would be received. So whatever you do, don’t shoot the messenger! Even if the question is off-base, don’t dismiss it. Recognize the legitimacy of the question and consider why it’s being asked. Acknowledge the underlying concerns and answer as a teacher would, with authenticity and compassion.
As the company grows, departmental meetings likely will become more important to employees and so it may make sense for all hands to be monthly, quarterly or somewhere in between.
What topics and techniques have you seen that were most impactful in company meetings? Post a comment below and let me know.