All-Hands meetings are a chance to get the whole company together on a regular cadence. They’re an important tool for keeping the company aligned and motivated.
For smaller companies, you should probably run these in exactly the same way you run Recurring Team Meetings. For larger companies, you might need a slightly different structure.
What are All Hands for?
All-Hands meetings are great for this sort of stuff…
- Reminding and Reinforcing your company vision, goals and objectives.
- Reinforcing your company values.
- Making Big Announcements.
- Providing context on strategic direction and how everyone’s work fits together.
- Sharing updates and successes from each department.
- Shouting out successes and great work.
- Introducing new joiners.
- Answering questions from across the company in a public forum.
- Socialising or workshopping outside of your normal teams.
A Template for Asynchronous Updates
As with all meetings, we should try to do anything which can be done asynchronously beforehand. This matters even more for all-hands – if you have 100 people on a call for an hour it’s really important that we don’t waste time on low-value stuff on the call.
The template below is designed to do as much asynchronously as possible. Leaders are expected to fill out their parts well ahead of time, and attendees are expected to read/watch them before the meeting.
The template includes the company mission, values, north star and current objectives, as well as progress against the current Key Results. Bar the KR progress, these should remain pretty much unchanged between meetings. It’s important to keep this stuff front and centre.
There are then sections for leaders to fill out ahead of time so folks can read/watch before the call. These include…
- CEO Update – This is the CEOs chance to reinforce their core messages and give a strategic update. It’s important to write this well (like you would a board update) and tie it back to the mission and objectives. The Big Wins section is a place to highlight major achievements from across the company since the last all hands.
- Announcements and reminders – This is the place to highlight any important announcements, remind the whole company of stuff they should already have seen on slack and introduce any new starters.
- Department updates – The sections here are for department leads to give a brief update on their progress against KRs, key numbers, links to external dashboards etc. You’ll probably find that some departments always share the same graphs along with their written update (financial numbers, sales figures etc). Consider adding these to the template if you can.
The Actual Agenda
It’s a good idea to follow a set agenda for the first part of these meetings. Using the template above, it’d look something like this…
The second part of the meeting should have a definite purpose too, thought it might change from meeting to meeting. In the template, the focus is on cross-team socialisation:
But you could also use this time to do some workshopping on a company-wide issue (also in breakout rooms) or have someone present a deep dive into some topic that will be interesting to the whole firm.
Encouraging Participation
All-Hands in large companies can often suffer from a lack of participation – it’s understandably scary to speak up in a zoom cal of 300 people! You can deal with this by:
- Using breakout rooms lots.
- Asking for questions via the chat or a tool like Slido.
- Asking for volunteers to lead parts of the meeting (ahead of time, obviously).
- Offering a prize for best question to the leadership team.