How to run a great All-hands meeting from the companies getting it right
How to run a great All-hands meeting from the companies getting it right
Insights from Top Hat, Vena, Gadget.dev, Motley Fool, Humi, and others
I write a bi-weekly column on leadership, management, and the future of work. In each case, I’ll tackle the questions on the minds of first-time managers, experienced managers, and even executives. I’ll leverage my own experience as a tech leader as well as my network to answer these questions in the most comprehensive, actionable, and accessible way.
The company All-hands meeting is by far the most expensive meeting at your company. It’s also one of the most valuable times in the calendar to align, engage, and inspire your team around what you’re building and where you’re going.
Yet, it seems like most struggle to find a formula that works for them. From some of the teams I’ve spoken to recently, it’s actually having a negative impact on the team. The material is rushed, the presenters unprepared, and the format difficult to follow.
This got me thinking: what makes a great All-hands and what can we learn from the companies getting it right?
The below is an effort to codify and summarize my own experiences as well as document insights from a range of companies (big and small) that were referred to me by their own attendees.
I hope this goes some small way towards helping you make the most of this time.
Before we dive in, I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations: Joel Marans (VP of Internal Communications and Employer Brand at Top Hat), Jane Maguire (Head of Talent at Gadget), Paul Charlton (VP Digital at CPA Ontario), Mary Papagiannis (Senior Talent Manager at Vena), Tasha Simpson (Employee Experience Lead at Humi), Liz Culotti (Executive Assistant at Loblaw Digital), and Jason Goldlist (Founder and CEO at Venue).
0. On Why.
The purpose of an All-hands is above all else about high fidelity communication. If your team doesn’t know what you’re trying to do, why you’re doing it, or how they can contribute it will make it next to impossible to achieve your company’s mission.
The goal of an All-hands should be to do three things exceptionally well:
Inspire: Why does this matter in the grander scheme of things?
Align: What are we trying to achieve together and how can the team help?
Engage: Why should I be excited and what does it mean for me?
1. On Size. It matters.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a company's size has a massive influence on what’s necessary or even achievable with an All-hands. Not only do larger companies have more resources to invest in making great All-hands - in some cases dedicated teams - but they also have significantly more information to communicate and complexity to untangle.
While size will impact a number of the important variables below, it’s important to note that much of the guidance below is applicable whether you’re running a small or large organization.
For that reason, the below guidance is not written for a certain-sized company. My hope is that there’s relevant and actionable information here whether you’re 15 or more than 500 people.
2. On Resourcing. Ensure you budget enough time to prepare.
The way to think about the amount of time to invest is to make it relative to the number of people that will be attending. The more people attending, the more meeting hours you’re expending and therefore the higher the bar needs to be to make sure you’re leveraging everyone’s time wisely.
For instance, if you’re a 15-person company it makes sense to spend only a small amount of time on pulling content together because internal alignment and communication are already easier and the total number of meeting hours spent is on the lower end (e.g. ~15 hours for 15 people to attend a 1-hour meeting).
However, if you’re a 500-person company the total number of meeting hours jumps to 500 hours and the complexity to both coordinate and cover that much content requires a lot more effort.
Lastly, when budgeting time there are two separate buckets of time to consider:
Host/Owner: The best run All-hands have a single, central owner (see more below) who is responsible for coordinating internally to make sure all the right content is ready to go. They will often play a “host” role too by welcoming everyone and smoothing transitions between presenters. While the time varied quite a bit from those I spoke with, the average time they spend getting the deck ready is between 30 and 60 minutes.
Individual Presenters: In every example reviewed, there were multiple presenters at each All-hands. The average number of presenters varied between 3 to 8 with each taking between 30 and 60 minutes to prepare their own material.
3. On Ownership. Assign a single owner.
This can be difficult in a small company where resources are tight, but the benefit of a clear owner (even if it’s the CEO) means the quality and consistency of each All-hands is dramatically higher.
From the group I spoke to, the most frequent owners are the following:
CEO
Internal Comms
Chief of Staff
Senior HR Leader
CEO Executive Assistant
Rotating Executive Team Members
In most cases, one of the above owners will own the All-hands each and every time, but in some cases, there are “takeovers” where a new team or team member steps in to run it. This is used to highlight particular teams and the work they’re doing and to keep it fresh.
For organizations with >150 employers, the most common theme is to have rotating executive team members present each time.
4. On Structure. Anchor on key content, but leave flexibility to keep it fresh.
This is an area that is particularly sensitive to the size of the organization.
By and large, the larger the company the more “structured” the content is kept. That is to say, they have the same consistent topics they cover each week. More than anything, this is for practical reasons because at scale (say >300) you can’t pull together content and talking points quite the same way as when you’re 15 people.
There are a number of other advantages to keeping a clear and consistent structure. For one, it makes it easier to show progress on key themes and topics because you’re anchoring the content each week. It also means it’s easier for your audience to follow because they already know what to expect.
In cases where companies were keeping a relatively consistent structure, there is a LOT in common with how the very best are structuring their content. In almost every case, they hit the following topics:
People Updates: New Hires, Promotions, Anniversaries etc.
Highlighting Values: Special spotlight on employees who are embodying their company values with specific examples
Customer Feedback: Showcasing the good/bad/ugly of what customers are saying about the product or service.
Mission, Strategy, and Progress: Typically the CEO or senior leadership provides a review of the company’s strategy and progress against key KPIs (often including financials)
Roadmap Deep-Dive: A walk-through of what’s been shipped, what’s being worked on, and what’s coming next.
AMAs: An open forum for employees to ask senior leadership questions about the business
However, where possible there is a strong bias to keep the structure as flexible as possible to keep things fresh and people engaged:
“I think that one of the main points to prevent disengagement is variety.”
~ Jane Maquire, Head of Talent at Gadget
In many cases, this means staying very close to what’s going on in the business and building the All-hands around what’s most top of mind at that moment. This could be a particular feature that’s about to launch and the theme of the All-hands becomes more of a live demo. Alternatively, it could be a big RFP win that the team just delivered and the Sales group wants to do a deep dive into what went well and highlight everyone who helped make it happen.
While this more agile approach is harder to pull off at scale, Mary Papagiannis (Senior Talent Manager @ Vena) shared how Vena (~700 employees) leverages size to their advantage. For every All-hands they rotate who’s presenting - one week it might be Sales, the next week product:
“So there's never the same group presenting ... they truly switch it up and that means the content and delivery is always different.”
~ Mary Papagiannis, Senior Talent Manager at Vena
5. On Tooling. Invest in the right tech stack.
I remember the first All-hands I attended where I was genuinely floored was back in 2015 when I joined Tilt (subsequently acquired by Airbnb) as their Country Manager for Canada.
While I’d attended some great All-hands in the past, Tilt invested the kind of attention and detail to it that made them really stand out.
While we were still a small team at the time (<50 people), the company’s founders - James Beshara and Khaled Hussein - made significant investments in the “production” quality of the presentations that made them feel more like a piece of entertainment than a stale corporate update.
They pieced together the very best in audio, visual, and streaming services to make sure the quality bar was as high whether you were in-person or remote. What made this even more unique, is that this was done well before the flood of cloud services that launched just before (no Zoom!) or immediately following the pandemic.
The care, attention, and investments they made signalled that the information to come was going to be valuable and the feedback was consistently strong from the team.
Today, it’s even easier to make this happen and it’s more important than ever. Over 80% of the companies I spoke to run their All-hands either completely remotely or hybrid and none require everyone to be in person.
Given this, there was a wide array of tools to tackle some of the unique challenges of hosting high-quality All-hands at scale. While there was a degree of consistency around the tech stack (Google Meet, Zoom) that will not surprise anyone, there were a number of organizations leveraging more innovative platforms to make the most of their All-hands that are well worth a mention:
Venue - Venue is an all-in-one communications platform to create, host, organize, and share important team events like all hands, webinars, and AMAs.
Gather - Gather is a video chat platform designed to make virtual interactions more human.
6. On Cadence. Plan to run them at least monthly, if not more frequently.
Regarding cadence, the first thing to point out is that almost everyone agreed on the importance of a set schedule for the All-hands. While they differed on how often they should run, more than 95% spoke to the criticality of a fixed schedule that doesn’t change.
On the question of how often they should run, there is a dead-even split between companies hosting them weekly or bi-weekly (37%) and those hosting them on a monthly basis (37%). While less common, I’m surprised to see almost 25% of people respond that they host them quarterly given how much can change at a company over that period of time.
Interestingly, while I didn’t break out the data by company size there is not much of a correlation between the size of the company and the frequency. In other words, large companies were just as likely to meet frequently (i.e. weekly) as small companies, despite the larger cost. In my experience, the cadence is heavily dictated by the culture and values of the organization. Some companies prize transparency over many other things and therefore even at very large numbers, they still invest in these critical rituals to keep teams aligned.
7. On Timing. Choose a day of the week that makes sense.
An oft-overlooked detail in All-hands planning is choosing the right day of the week. When choosing the day of the week, be sure you choose a day that matches the rhythm of your team and business. This encourages greater participation and ensures you can still meet the expectations of your customers.
When I was at Checkout 51, we had a massive sales organization that served our business and that of our larger parent company. They had very few “in-office days”, which meant for most of the week they were travelling to visit clients or take meetings with prospects. In order to ensure we included them the senior leadership team did a great job of scheduling the All-hands on a day when the majority of them would be in office. This made a huge difference and meant they were very well attended.
This may well explain why - to my surprise - there is a very even distribution when it comes to the most popular day of the week to host. While I would have expected there to be one or two days that were the most popular, that isn’t borne out in the data.
What’s more, the most popular day of the week is Wednesday rather than a Friday, which in my own personal experience has been the most popular time to host.
Lastly, a key consideration when choosing the date is whether you want to create a moment beyond just the All-hands presentation itself. For instance, do you want everyone to attend and then come back to their desks or do you want to use it as an opportunity to foster culture?
Jane remembers the early All-hands at Shopify fondly, which were hosted on Friday from 4 pm to 5 pm and designed around employee engagement and collaboration well beyond just the presented material:
“They organized a huge buffet for everyone each week. It was a full, full-on event. It helped everyone wind down into the weekend and people would stay for hours and hours just talking. I’m trying to create the same vibe here at Gadget.dev”
~ Jane Maquire, Head of Talent at Gadget
While it’s far more difficult to pull off these in-person events now with many people still working remotely, I spoke with many leaders who were recreating this kind of experience remotely by providing gift cards for lunches/dinners/snacks as part of the All-hands experience to encourage participation and engagement.
8. On Interactivity. Make it participant friendly.
A frequent mistake I’ve seen made is to treat an All-hands like a one-way flow of information. It’s of course tempting because you feel like you’ve got so much information you want to communicate in a very short amount of time.
However, the goal is not to get through all the information in a set amount of time. The goal is to inspire, align, and engage your team. For that, you’ll need to make it a two-way flow of information.
There are a number of ways to do this really well. For example, when I was at Clearco one of the best-reviewed parts of the All-hands was when we would bring in a special guest to come and speak to the team about a particular topic we were focused on as a business. We would open up the talk to questions and our Zoom chat box would become flooded with questions, the vast majority of which got answered by our guests. Andrew D’Souza and Michele Romanow did an incredible job of finding the right people at the right time to bring in and that made all the difference.
Another, much simpler way to encourage interactivity and more engagement is to enable your team to submit questions ahead of time or to run an AMA-style section of your All-hands towards the end of the presentation. This will give your team a platform to talk to you and communicate an openness and level of transparency that’s important for any leadership team.
It can be challenging to balance both the presentation as well as the interactivity component in the allotted time. In this case, the most practical way of addressing this that I’ve come across is from the team at Humi. For their All-hands (aka “Humi Halls”) they actually separate out the AMA section from the main presentation so that people can focus on the content and they can answer everyone’s questions.
They even go a step further and have two different AMA sections that follow a week after the All-hands: one focuses on business and product questions and the other on people and culture-related questions.
“This means we don’t have to rush the presentation and people have time to think through the questions they want to ask, instead of having to do on the spot.”
~ Tasha Simpson, Employee Experience Lead at Humi
It’s worth noting that an interactive component is not for the faint of heart and you will almost certainly get very difficult questions from the team. However, I believe it’s worth it given you gain a clear understanding of what’s on your team’s mind and you’ll have an opportunity to answer it in a way you’d like as opposed to it being discussed without you.
9. On Remote Teams. Run multiple All-hands.
While you’ll take pains to ensure you pick a time that works for everyone, there are going to be situations where there’s just not a time that works for everyone (e.g. too many time zones to support).
In this case, I would suggest running a second All-hands at a more convenient time and with the same content.
While this can seem overly onerous, you’ve got to consider the alternative. You’ve made an investment to grow your team internationally and for it to be a success they will need to feel connected to what’s going on in the business, which is particularly hard when you’re permanently remote and geographically distant.
If you choose to host a meeting at a time they can’t attend, you’re sending a clear signal (deliberately or not) that it’s less important to update them than it is to update others. The reality is that international employees are already missing a lot of context by not being at “HQ” and therefore you need to make even more of an effort to ensure that they have the information they need to thrive in a remote setting.
10. On Culture. Make it your own.
The very best All-hands follow many of the best practices outlined here, but where many set themselves apart is by bringing their own “special sauce”. It’s not necessarily something big (although some are!), but rather something that’s fun and unique and most importantly reinforces the company’s culture.
One of my favourites is from the team at Top Hat, where Joel Marans (VP of Internal Communications and Employer Brand) is responsible for running their weekly All-hands. He shared that each week they have a “Top Hatter” curate a playlist of their favourite music that’s then shared with the company and posted on their website:
“We’ve been doing it since the early pandemic days. It's been a fun and great way to learn about our people”
~ Joel Marans, VP Internal Communications and Employer Brand at Top Hat
Perhaps the most unique and extravagant one I’ve come across is from the team at Motley Fool (an investment guidance company). As part of their monthly All-hands, the company conducts a draw where one employee is selected to embark on a "Fool’s Errand". The more tenure at the company, the more entries you receive!
If chosen, the selected individual must take a mandatory two-week break, completely disconnecting from the office. You receive a stipend and are encouraged to travel anywhere globally and pursue any activity of your choice, under the condition that you complete one personal finance task during your time off.
Interestingly, beyond just the fun and engagement factor the primary objective remains to ensure seamless operation within each team even when a member is absent. Colleagues left behind are tasked with evaluating any hitches encountered during the selected Fool's (What Motley Fool employees are called) absence, striving to enhance the overall workflow.
11. On Feedback. Get it.
Lastly, it’s critical to get some form of feedback on whether your All-hands is delivering on your expectations and those of your team. The very best companies use an NPS-like score so they can not only capture feedback on individual meetings but can see trends over time and make adjustments if necessary.
Ultimately, the goal of an All-hands is to inspire, align, and engage and if it’s not doing those things well it’s likely a very, very expensive meeting.
The good news is when done well, it’s likely by far the most impactful meeting.
🚀 Scaling a company is hard. If you’re a Founder/CEO or member of the executive team looking for support I can help. 🚀
I provide advisory services to high-growth companies on building their people, teams, and systems to achieve extraordinary results.