All-hands meetings are routine company-wide meetings where everyone in the organization sits down to discuss the nuts and bolts of the organization. Usually, these meetings talk about changes and updates within the company, re-align the mission and focus in the coming months, acknowledge milestones, and recognize the contributions of everyone at the organization. Let’s dive into why you must set up all-hands meetings at your organization and how you can run successful and guiding all-hands meeting on a monthly basis.
Importance of an All-Hands Meeting
All-hands meetings are the only time you get to sit down with the people who make your organization what it is and realign with them about the goals, mission, and targets that the organization has in the upcoming future.
Aligning your goals is important to ensure everyone is working towards the same thing and ultimately, ensures employees are more productive.
Another advantage of having regular all-hands meetings is that it increases team culture and spirit. Your employees get time to reconnect and bond with each other, share their accomplishments and feel appreciated in the organization.
What’s more, a good all-hands meeting helps employees present their work and put forward their roadblocks and fellow team members can volunteer to help the employee out with the problem, fostering team collaboration.
Top 5 Tips to Organize an All-Hands Meeting
While all-hands meetings are usually a straightforward activity, we want to help you set up these monthly meetings in a way that impacts your employees and helps them improve their work quality.
These top 5 tips will help you navigate planning an all-hands meeting and make it easier for you to implement the meeting on a routine basis.
1. Set a fixed day every month to keep employees prepared
There’s no surprise to your all-hands meetings. This is why as HR, you need to set a date every month so employees can keep their schedules clear and you have enough time to plan it.
Fixing the date also helps to set expectations of this monthly session and departments can take stock of the work they’ve done in advance. Your employees will look forward to your all-hands meetings if it’s a fixed date in their calendar.
Usually, organizations have all-hands meetings at the start or end of the month since this makes it easier to close out the work done in the month before and set down priorities for the upcoming month.
2. Set the agenda a week ahead
The agenda for your all-hands is crucial to ensuring a smooth-sailing meeting. Your agenda can include the following sessions:
- Set the schedule for the meeting within the first 5 minutes.
- Use the next 15 minutes for an ice-breaker session.
- Raise spirits by giving an update and talk milestones and accomplishments from the month prior.
- Allow people from different departments to talk about the work done by their team in the last month with a demo session. This may be the longest session within your all-hands but it is the most important session of the day.
- Cater a team lunch and treat the entire team to a well-deserved meal.
Allow employees to ask questions and gain more clarity from the upper management with an Ask Me Anything session. - Take stock of the needs and pains of your employees with a quick feedback session. This time can also be used by employees to provide suggestions on product or service features and upgrades.
- Lastly, take a few minutes to set the expectations for the month ahead, talking about the targets you want to hit organization-wide as well as department-wise.
If you plan to re-align the team to the goals and mission of the company, put this session at the top of your agenda.
Setting expectations on a larger organization level should be done first thing when spirits are high.
Does creating weekly agendas stress you and your team? Read our article on how to create a weekly work plan with your team without stressing.
3. Rotate your moderator
Having the same moderator every month would get boring. One of the easiest ways to spice up your all-hands meetings and make it interesting for all your employees is to rotate your moderator.
Assign one employee every month to lead the meeting and carry the agenda forward. You can either ask your team to volunteer or pick employees who have a large project to showcase.
4. Have different people from the organization demo their work
One of the best sessions that most all-hands meetings feature is the demo session. Here, one team member from each department gets to showcase the work done by the department. And also explain their plan ahead.
Demo sessions help create transparency across departments and give everyone a clear idea of what’s happening in the company. Developers may not know about the growth hacking tool that the marketing team is building.
Meanwhile, the creative team may be lost about what problems the developers are trying to solve. This is where demo sessions help.
Having clarity in everyone’s work also allows employees to show interest in working on a project done by another department. And volunteer to contribute to the project. This freedom makes employees more motivated to make more of an impact within the organization. It’s way better than restricting them to daily chores.
5. Have a fun ice-breaker session
Your all-hands meetings don’t have to be all work. Instead, start the meeting with a fun activity. This can either be an ice-breaker session like an interactive game or having everyone share a fun activity they did. You can even have your employees play a fun board game to lighten the mood.
Starting your all-hands with such a lighter session gives your employees time to interact with each other. It helps them loosen up after a long month of hard work.
We, in fact, wrote a post on some of team building activities and events that can spice up work routines. And also help with team bonding. Read it here.
Ready to set up all-hands meetings to foster team collaboration and increase employee productivity?
