All-hands meetings are a staple in any mid-to-large sized company, and essential to help employees and stakeholders align. Because it typically involves the whole company, it is important to ensure that the meetings are able to engage everyone present, not only to improve employee engagement, but also to ensure that the information being shared sticks.
An easy way to improve those meetings is to make use of an audience engagement tool like Pigeonhole Live. Here are ten ways to use Pigeonhole Live at your all hands meetings.
1. Agenda
Before the meeting starts, it should first have a set agenda. Use the Pigeonhole Live as a central place to share the meeting’s agenda. Not all sessions have to be interactive: while you can add live Q&As and polls, you can also use our regular sessions to schedule toilet breaks, non-interactive talks, or even lunch.
2. Mood Meter
Try to start off an all-hands meeting by checking in with everyone. A word cloud is an easy way to quickly read the mood of the room while adding a social element to the otherwise serious meeting. It’s also a great way to break the ice at the beginning of the day.
3. Live Q&A
Two-way dialogue is key at an all hands meeting. For each speaker in an all hands meeting, have a live Q&A to keep the attendees engaged to the content being shared. Allowing them to raise questions or even concerns during the session virtually, and addressing them later, helps to increase the questions asked and ensure that everyone is aligned on the topic being communicated.
4. Quiz
Add an element of fun with a Quiz. Creating one about teams or employees could keep the focus onto the company, or go nuts and treat it like a quickfire trivia night. You’d be surprised who knows what.
5. Fun Live Poll
Another way to lighten the mood in an all-hands meeting is to have a fun poll. Starting your all-hands meetings with a poll could be a great way to familiarise employees with the tool, and also set the right tone from the beginning.
The poll could be anything, from their preferences on lunch places or the kind of pets they have. Most importantly, make it about a piece of information that people can share about themselves - that way, something simple could turn into a new avenue for everyone to learn something new about their colleagues.
6. Decision-making poll
Instead of using our poll tool as an ice-breaker, try using it to get a census of your company or team’s perspective. This will help boost employee engagement by allowing your team to have a say in some decisions made in the team, or to have their perspective shared with members of management.
Some questions could include
- How much do you like working with your current team?
- What snacks would you like to see more of in the pantry?
- How much are you enjoying your current work?
- How would you like to do during our company D&D?
- Would you prefer a four day work week or an increase in leave?
7. Appreciation Time
We’ve shared this before: sharing your appreciation for people within the company can be a great way to create a positive atmosphere in the company. This can be great to keep employees engaged on a regular day, or a handy way to lift spirits when a company goes through a rough time.
Simply open up an Open-Ended Poll in advance and get everyone to nominate someone they want to appreciate that week. It could be for small things like clearing the trash or big achievements like winning a new client. Then, have everyone vote for the nominations they want to support. You could then call out the names of the people being nominated during the all-hands, or even give a prize to the person with the highest nominations.
8. Feedback collection
Need to collect feedback on some work being done, or a new project about to launch? Present it during all-hands and either have a Live Q&A open to invite questions or get everyone to fill in a survey.
9. Suggestion Box
You’ve probably seen one of those physical boxes sitting in offices where you can slip in notes with suggestions from the office? Well, you can have a virtual one as well. Simply create an Open-Ended Poll and leave it open before the all-hands meeting. To encourage more suggestions, try turning on anonymity to ensure that people feel safe suggesting ideas. If you prefer to manage the responses, you can turn on filtering so that only approved suggestions are presented publicly.
An added bonus? This method allows people to vote on the suggestion they prefer.
10. CEO Q&A
The CEO Q&A is the cornerstone of all-hands meetings. Opening the floor to questions for the CEO, or any other manager, could help improve engagement during these meetings.
To help the CEO prepare for the questions, open the Q&A a few days before the meeting and encourage people to send in their questions early. That way, the CEO will have time to look through the kind of questions people want to ask, and won’t be caught off guard.
At the same time, there likely isn’t enough time to answer all the questions, so ensuring that people can vote for questions helps the CEO spend more time on what matters most to them.
