Four Alternatives to the Team All-Hands

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All-hands meetings (or ‘town halls’) are part and parcel of Silicon Valley. You would be hard-pressed to find a tech company where this regular meeting isn’t ingrained in the process. It’s a well-accepted way to build and reinforce company culture, increase employee engagement, and achieve alignment with company goals and expectations.

However, these meetings can often become time-wasters frustrating employees and management alike. In this article, we’ll discuss the problems with all-hands meetings and four alternatives to them.

Key Takeaways

• Team all-hands meetings are costly, lack team engagement, and deliver old information.

• Consider using digital dashboards and chat platforms to give employees information instantaneously and regularly.

• Informal conversations often foster far more innovation and productivity than all-hands meetings do.

The Problems With Team All-Hands Meetings

As the business landscape gets more competitive, companies get larger and move faster, and remote workforces become more prevalent, the need for team alignment is greater than ever.

Relying on your all-hands as a key strategy to achieve team alignment is no longer enough. You need to invest in other strategies to achieve the benefits that the all-hands previously afforded.

Why? The reality is that the efficacy of all-hands meetings is decreasing. While helpful, these meetings should no longer be your go-to strategy to achieve team alignment for the following reasons:

• Think about what it costs your business to have your whole team stop working and spend an hour in a room with you.

  Ignoring preparation, travel time and the natural switching cost before and after the meeting, one hour of time for a team of 200 attendees at an average salary of $100,000 per year equates to just a direct cost of $9,615. That’s one expensive meeting — you’d better choose your agenda carefully.

• Nearly 63% of companies in the US today have remote workers, and many more have multiple office locations, with part of the team located in other offices or time zones. It’s no longer an option to send a calendar invitation out and wait for the team to present in a conference room.

  Scheduling a company-wide meeting means complex AV/broadcasting setups, careful time zone management and invariably disadvantaging some parts of the team who are located elsewhere.

• Due to the one-to-many style of an all-hands meeting, it is usually a presentation from leadership to the business. Delivering content in this way is effective in terms of getting the message out, but is certainly not the most effective way to engage a team.

  It’s nearly impossible to receive feedback, encourage discussion, and answer more than a few questions.

  Communication between groups of people is most effective when participants are engaged, and the discussion is both inclusive and collaborative, the antithesis of the “great unveil” style presentation.

• The nature of fast-growing businesses means that by the time you have prepared for the all-hands meetings, delivered the content and attendees have left the room, the information is likely out of date or less relevant than it was when you received it.

  Unless your all-hands meetings predominantly contain evergreen content like skills training, delivering content in an offline forum means the delivery of stale, or soon-to-be-stale knowledge.

Having personally experienced these four drawbacks, we knew that we needed alternatives to the all-hands if we were to maximize the alignment and engagement of our growing team. After experimentation, we came up with four simple strategies that have each had a tremendous impact on our team.

Four Alternatives to All-Hands Meetings

1. Dashboarding as a Culture

   Nearly every all-hands meeting spends a material part of the agenda updating the business on metrics – sales, revenue, growth, churn, or whatever matters to your business.

   Why can’t this information be transmitted continuously? Aside from the cultural benefits of building a team where transparency is highly valued, everyone can be aware of important metrics every day, saving you time and avoiding sharing outdated data.

   Products like Geckoboard and Baremetrics allow businesses this functionality out of the box, with the ability to connect almost any piece of software to the right number or graph on a screen.

   Some of our company’s most valuable discussions and decisions have occurred in front of our wall-mounted dashboards.

2. Chat

   Hopefully you’re aware of the benefits of instant chat for business through products like Slack, Stride, or Twist. Company-wide chat is an effective way to instantly disseminate knowledge or insights in one click.

   You can keep your team updated on progress, challenges, and important developments in relevant channels, which are available for reading at their convenience.

   With weekly engineering and marketing reports delivered by Slack in our business, we’re able to keep the team on the same page and encourage threaded discussion, questions, and ideas, without scheduling anything or anyone leaving their desk.

   We regularly send out updates in a broadcast Slack channel, alert specific teams of opportunities or challenges and encourage questions, discussion and idea generation in response. We think about this strategy as a real-time, on-demand all-hands meeting.

3. Informal Conversations

   We asked our team where the most effective offline knowledge sharing occurred, and were surprised by the answer. It wasn’t in the well-prepared all-hands meetings with slide decks and reports. It was over a team coffee or while eating pizza together on a Friday.

   Why? Because the team felt like they could ask questions, disagree, suggest ideas, and contribute to the discussion. The best part is that these types of conversations are far less costly than the typical all-hands.

   We have therefore also adopted informal coffees and lunches as an alternative to the all-hands for updating the team and raising challenges and opportunities to drive team alignment.

   It’s an effective way for your team to feel a part of something greater and be able to share their views and ask questions of leadership.

4. Real-Time Knowledge Sharing Solutions

   If dashboarding is effective as a way to share quantitative data with your team in real-time, what about qualitative data like customer insights, feedback and important meeting outcomes?

   You need a way to make meeting notes shareable and actionable in your team’s existing tools, allowing everyone to understand what your customer is thinking and saying.

   By ensuring the team is exposed to customer insights, trends and meeting takeaways as they occur, your team is naturally on the same page, without any management overhead.

   This has enabled us to use our other strategies mentioned above to drive fruitful discussion and updates on other facets of the business. We now allocate zero meeting time to sharing data and insights.

   In sum, my advice is to revisit your team’s all-hands strategy and ask whether it is sufficiently contributing to the alignment of your team. Maybe you can achieve more for your team with less.

All-Hands Meeting Alternatives FAQ

1. What can I do instead of staff meetings?

   Instead of staff meetings give employees information via a digital dashboard, instant chat, or video.

Digital dashboards and instant chat platforms allow you to give your employees real-time data.

In addition, videos allow you to share information without having to coordinate everyone’s schedules, and they can be used as a reference for employees in the future.

Smaller meetings make it easier for everyone to take a turn sharing, and they’re often less intimidating for employees who may hesitate to speak up.

In addition, asking for feedback from each person creates space for everyone to share, and asking your team not to interrupt ensures that everyone can speak their mind.

Both of these platforms allow employees to share information and ideas in real-time rather than scheduling a meeting.

Author

Conner Martin

Conner is a professional writer and editor who has worked in a variety of different industries and media. He is passionate about communication and about making even complex topics accessible to wide audiences. Conner holds a Master of Professional Writing degree from the University of Oklahoma.