An all-hands meeting is not these things: a lecture, a monologue, just another meeting. It’s a vital platform for the company’s leadership team to engage directly with employees—and vice-versa.
That’s why it’s crucial to get it right. You must blend informative content with interactive elements and ensure every voice is heard. It’s a tricky balancing act, but mastering it can significantly enhance employee engagement and collaboration.
This guide will help you navigate this challenge by providing a solid understanding of the fundamentals. You’ll learn what an all-hands meeting is and why you should host it regularly. From there, you’ll find actionable tips and easy-to-use tools so you can start running effective all-hands meetings immediately.
An all-hands meeting is a way for the entire company to come together to ensure that leaders and employees are on the same page.
While traditionally used by leadership to share key updates, an effective all-hands should be a two-way conversation about topics affecting all attendees. This offers your staff a chance to ask questions, share feedback, and stay connected—especially in large or distributed organisations.
Depending on your needs, you can host it monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or as needed.
Sometimes called a town hall, an all-hands meeting is important because it allows top management to share key messages with employees personally. It’s also where the latter can receive answers to their questions instantly.
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💡 What is the difference between an all-hands meeting and a town hall meeting? While these terms are often interchangeable, you can differentiate an all-hands meeting by its clear agenda. As the name suggests, a town hall meeting is more of an open dialogue—it has a set of topics to cover, but it can flow in a few different ways based on individual issues and concerns. Both are platforms for direct communication between leadership and employees. An all-hands meeting includes an interactive Q&A and is aimed at aligning everyone around company goals and updates. A town hall meeting is specifically designed to gather input, hear concerns, and accommodate a wide range of questions and feedback. |
Specifically, an all-staff meeting serves as a platform to:
🤩 B for benefits. No matter what you want to communicate, you can achieve the ‘three Bs’ of hosting an all-hands if you do it right. You can build trust, bond, and promote belonging at every session.
Direct communication between bosses and employees presents valuable opportunities to build a culture of transparency and trust.
But this only works if leaders are open to sharing important information, such as sales figures, employee satisfaction survey results, and financial data. They must also show candour when addressing complex topics.
How to achieve this: Too often, employees feel distanced from their leaders because their concerns go unheard or ignored. An authentic and intimate all-hands is a strategic way to close the gap.
Be sincere when asking for feedback and welcome diverse perspectives. You can provide an anonymous Q&A platform that encourages more people to speak up. And finally, make efforts to resolve issues and improve areas of concern.
All-hands meetings shouldn’t be all work and no play. Use them to add some company-level fun, celebrate team milestones, recognise work anniversaries, and show employee appreciation!
These meetings are also perfect for bonding activities, such as interdepartmental talent shows and holiday-themed events (e.g. a Halloween photo contest).
How to achieve this: Start your meeting with a fun game or check-in question to break the ice. You can set up an open-ended poll, such as "What was your proudest achievement this quarter?" This sets the right tone and energy, keeping everyone motivated, inspired, and engaged.
To further strengthen that sense of community, consider a ‘spotlight a colleague’ segment. Put one to two employees on an ‘honour chair’ as the others talk about the contributions, successes, and attributes they love about their peers. A few individuals can speak briefly while the rest can chime in the chat.
Inclusivity in an all-hands meeting means giving every employee—regardless of their background, role, or location—a chance to be heard. Just asking for feedback isn’t enough. True inclusivity involves actively including all voices in shaping the company’s direction.
How to achieve this: To encourage open and honest communication, allow employees to vote on ideas, submit questions, or share feedback anonymously. You can keep the Q&A accessible for a reasonable time period. An extended Q&A supports employees from various time zones, gives them time to think, and includes those who missed the live session.
McKinsey & Company says it best:
Better meetings mean you spend the rest of your time feeling more purposeful in carrying out your work.
If you want your all-staff meeting to be engaging and productive, these actions will take you there. Here’s how to run an all-hands your employees will look forward to. Take what resonates—and for a deeper study, dive into each tip in the sequel to this guide (coming soon!).
Create a Q&A session on Pigeonhole Live and ask your employees to submit their questions a few days or weeks before the meeting. Do this to:
Set an agenda that combines informative content with interactive elements. The structure and sequence will depend on how much time you have (at Pigeonhole Live, we dedicate 1 ½ hours to our all-hands meetings).
Feel free to switch it up to keep things fresh, but usually, your agenda might look something like this:
Create an Agenda in Pigeonhole Live, complete with Speaker profiles and photos, and share it with your employees before the all-hands meeting
For a seamless all-hands meeting—whether online, in-person, or hybrid—use video conferencing tools paired with good audio/visual equipment like projectors and speakers. Test everything in advance, including interactive elements like quizzes, polls, and Q&A.
For hybrid meetings, prepare the venue and ensure everyone can see and hear you clearly. And last but not least, prioritise the needs of remote participants to promote inclusivity and engagement across all meeting formats.
Tap a team member who can act as the moderator. They should be someone you can rely on to do multiple tasks during the meeting:
Sometimes, sensitive topics like layoffs and restructuring come up in an all-hands meeting. Before breaking the news, train your leaders to speak with clarity and empathy. Explain in detail why and how you decided and what the impact will be.
Actively listen to someone expressing strong emotion, setting aside judgement and offering to speak with them separately after the meeting. Give employees time to process the information, reassure them that support is available, and provide contacts for further questions.
Put together a summary of key takeaways and next steps. You can generate this document using AI-powered summarisation or note-taking tools, such as Zoom’s AI Companion, Microsoft Teams' Meeting Insights, or Otter.ai.
This document lets those who missed the meeting catch up instantly and helps teams track their goals, responsibilities, and timelines.
If you created a Q&A session in Pigeonhole, you can leave it open after the meeting. This allows you to track unanswered questions and group them according to theme, department, and importance.
Department heads can then address specific questions and concerns within their teams to ensure no important issue is overlooked.
This form of asynchronous information is more effective and efficient than following up on them via emails, one-on-one meetings, or other channels.
💡 Pro tip: Use our AI Insights—currently in preview mode—to understand trending topics from your Q&A. You can also quickly gauge employee sentiment based on their questions, comments, and reactions. Q&A Insights can generate data minutes after a meeting, helping you take action faster.
Through custom integrations, you can easily add these tools to your existing tech stack. They play various roles in enhancing your all-hands so you can say goodbye to dull and unproductive meetings.
For a comprehensive list of tools, check out our guide to choosing the best tools for running your all-hands or town hall meetings.
Now that you’ve learned the fundamentals, you can further deepen your knowledge or develop your skills with these guides (coming soon!):
Launch interactive live Q&A, polls, and quizzes that boost employee engagement
All-hands meeting comes from the well-known phrase ‘all hands on deck,’ which means all crew members on a ship should come together on deck. It signals that everyone, regardless of duty, must be ready to help in an emergency or a time of great need.
At work, it means gathering top management and employees to ensure everyone is aligned on key updates, goals, and initiatives.
You can set this company-wide gathering according to your culture and communication style. Some teams schedule it monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or as needed.
For instance, a monthly all-hands is enough to keep everyone informed and aligned if you have about 150 employees under 5 departments, each meeting once a week.
To make an all-hands meeting interactive, mix informative content with engaging elements like Q&A sessions, polls, quizzes, and chances for employees to give feedback or ask questions. Add fun activities, celebrate milestones, and include everyone, no matter their role or location, to create an engaging atmosphere.