Written by: Ryan Arthur, Executive Operations Director at CareMessage

High Value, High Potential

All-Hands. Show and Tell. Town Hall. Forum. Whatever you choose to call it, this regular, company-wide meeting is simultaneously the highest cost and highest impact meeting at your company. Given the stakes, let’s dive into “All-Hands” and talk about what it is, why it’s important, how you might organize and run a successful All-Hands.

As the name implies, All-Hands is a regular or semi-regular company-wide meeting where all employees gather at the same time to discuss company and business updates, celebrate wins and share learnings, drive alignment around strategy, partake in a shared culture, and bond with each other.

Let’s first consider the cost of such a meeting. Hypothetical company Acme, Inc., has 100 employees with an average salary of $104k, or $50 per hour, and holds an hour-long weekly All-Hands meeting. This one meeting therefore “costs” $5,000 — for one meeting! While this cost scales up or down depending on your company’s payroll and headcount, the point remains: it’s an expensive meeting. It’s likely the most expensive regular meeting your company has.

Another, more productive way to look at this is to recognize that this meeting isn’t merely expensive — rather, it’s valuable. It’s an investment, and it has potential. In fact, it’s the highest potential meeting at your company. Suddenly, we can look at All-Hands not as a cost, but as an opportunity.

Design and Purpose

What are the best ways to seize that opportunity and make the most of it — to recognize its potential? While exactly how you do so is up to you and your company’s needs, there are several tried and true approaches I recommend that you can adopt and customize to your liking.

Share company and business updates. This can mean updates on core metrics, progress on important cross-functional initiatives, or even discussing specific departmental projects with a broad impact. The key is to focus on things that are important to the company at large and that deserve emphasis beyond what can be gained via a company-wide email or within smaller team meetings. Keep your audience in mind (reminder: everyone!) when deciding the level of detail to share and the notes to hit. You might even consider inviting guest presenters when appropriate — think of inviting a Board member to join you for a fireside chat, or a key customer to talk about their experience with your product.

Celebrate wins and share learnings. In short, be human. People love to win, and companies thrive on not just big, grand victories, but even more so on a series of small wins — momentum. Talk about your sales deals, share your customer highlights, and call out your recent launches. Celebrating your wins and recognizing accomplishments as a company helps remind everyone that it’s worth it, that we’re all here for the same reasons, and that we want to succeed. At the same time, be real: sometimes we make mistakes, even mistakes big enough to share with the entire company. Embrace a culture of retrospectives and continuous improvement — sometimes called kaizen — and don’t shy away from talking about where you’ve gone wrong and what you’re doing about it.

Drive alignment around company strategy. The CEO sets the company direction (mission and vision) for the team to drive toward, but the real trick is getting everyone — an entire company — to row in that same direction. Use All-Hands as an opportunity to clearly articulate the company’s strategy, to add context, and to help connect the dots for people so they can share in that company vision and see their own role in making it a reality. And once you’ve done so, do it again. Repeat it over and over, because it’s that important. We all spend our weeks engrossed in our own work, tasks, and deliverables (not to mention email, Slack, and meetings!), and it’s critical to take this opportunity to realign and reinforce the company’s higher-level strategy and goals.

Foster your company culture and bond. All-Hands is the one chance when everyone comes together, across all departments and teams, or even across time zones if you’re remote-based, to share in a common space and experience. Humans are social creatures, and as busy as we all may be with our own projects or within our own teams, finding time to gather together feels good, builds camaraderie, and gives folks a chance to spend time around those they might not otherwise in their day-to-day work. Whether you’re seeing another team present on what they’ve accomplished recently, or hearing from the CFO whom you’ve never personally met, or getting your own chance to work on your public speaking skills, exposing everyone to each other through a shared set of experiences is a worthwhile undertaking.

At CareMessage, we’ll devote an entire All-Hands roughly once a quarter to getting to know each other better on a personal level, inviting people to share about themselves and their lives through “Show & Tell” — whether it be a cooking lesson, a virtual tour of their hometown, or insights into their hobby or hidden talent.

Best Practices for Owners

A critical step in putting this all into practice is acknowledging that this highest-potential meeting deserves a dedicated owner, someone who will plan, coordinate, and curate the meeting to ensure the company is getting the highest ROI out of All-Hands. If you find the right person to own All-Hands, they will see it not merely as another task, or just another meeting, but more as a program or event — even an experience — which they provide to the company each time. Having the right owner and empowering them to make the most of All-Hands puts your company in the best position possible.

At CareMessage, it’s been my privilege to be the owner and host of All-Hands for 3.5 years and counting, and I’m in the unique position to amplify the company’s shared voice, highlight the best goings on across the business, and provide a place for people to shine in front of their colleagues. I’ve been fortunate to learn a lot through this experience and that of years past. Here are a few of my own best practices that I’d recommend to any company, and especially to those owning All-Hands:

Plan out your schedule of All-Hands up to a quarter in advance — meaning the major topics, themes, and presentations — and lock them in. This will take major strain off you week by week and allow you to focus on the high-quality production of each meeting without the distraction of scheduling. Hopefully, if you’re owning All-Hands, your greater role gives you a comprehensive, broad perspective into the goings on across the company; use this vantage point to discern what is best shared, and when. Consider the following: what important things are happening this quarter; which team(s) you haven’t heard from in a while; when a given topic was last visited; what important announcements deserve a place in front of the entire company; and so on. In short: how can you elevate and shine a light on the most important, highest-value things that will not only inform, but hopefully entertain and inspire people at the same time? If you can nail all three of those qualities, consider that the holy trifecta.

Keep a running queue of future potential topics and presenters that may not fit into this quarter’s schedule but would be valuable to include in the future. It’ll make planning the next quarter’s that much easier.

Schedule “pre-syncs” a few days prior to each All-Hands to meet one-on-one with the presenter(s) for that week. This is an opportunity to review their slides together, do a dry-run to get a sense of the flow of their presentation, and ask questions and provide feedback and suggestions. Put yourself in the [company-wide] audience’s shoes: given that you own this meeting, you should have a good sense for what works well, what will or won’t resonate, and how to strike the right balance with what is presented. Do everything you can to ensure the end product is excellent.

Don’t be afraid to cancel. Some weeks, there may not be compelling content worth sharing company-wide, or a sudden conflict beyond anyone’s control might preclude that week’s presenter(s) from presenting, or you may simply sense that the company just needs a break. This will of course depend on multiple factors, so use your best judgment, but keep it available as an option, when necessary.

Seek out feedback. Consider running an annual survey of the company to ask for opinions on All-Hands overall, ideas for future topics and presentations, and suggestions for improvements. You can even measure Net Promoter Score, or NPS (“On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend All-Hands to a new-hire at Your Company?”).

Put your all into All-Hands, week after week, and always seek to make minor improvements over time. This is the highest potential meeting at your company and an opportunity to showcase the most important stuff, bring people together, and align the team as a whole, hopefully while having some fun. Put on a stellar event, always, and if something doesn’t go well, learn from it, fix it, and move forward with confidence.

Final Thought

All-Hands is the highest potential meeting at your company. Treat it as such — invest in it, curate it, and care for it — and it will pay dividends for years to come as a core pillar of your company’s communications and culture.