TEAM CULTURE
How to Run the Perfect All-Hands at Your Startup
A well-run town-hall meeting should be your secret weapon to establish a positive team culture.
All-Hands or Townhall meetings have been a part of startup culture for a long while and our startup awork is no exception. Creating a productive and motivating work culture is more important than ever and I’d like to share the most important lessons we’ve learned since 2012 to help you host a successful All-Hands meeting for your team, too.
What you’ll learn in this article:
- Why All-Hands meetings are an important part of any company culture
- How to run an efficient and entertaining All-Hands meeting at the office or remotely
- What topics to include in All-Hands meetings and how to source them
Why All-Hands are an important part of your company culture
Besides being a very good way to communicate important developments, All-Hands meetings are unique in that they give perspective to everybody involved.
For founders, All-Hands meetings are a constant reminder of how much a company has grown and how much we care about each individual team member — seeing everybody’s curiosity directed at you on an All-Hands stage will most assuredly do that to you.
And even though our teams mostly work independently from each other, once a week, our company’s larger context becomes obvious. No other setting has the potential to fill that space in a company’s culture quite like a Friday afternoon meeting with — literally — everybody. This also makes it the most expensive event of the week (at our external consulting rates and team size, every hour of an All-Hands meeting is worth well over 5k €). The amount of shared understanding for our topics and strategy is however more than worth the investment.
Presentations, announcements and reactions at an All-Hands meeting have more weight than on any other channel and can therefore be used to deliberately focus on strategically and culturally important aspects of the business.
How to run a successful All-Hands meeting
Let’s take a look at our current All-Hands procedure and then shed some light on its development and raison d’être.
The general setting for an All-Hands meeting
Every Friday at 4 pm we get the team together for our regular All-Hands meeting. Whoever is in the office gathers in our central meeting area, where we move sofas and chairs into a conference setting and put on some music. To facilitate any remote participants, the meeting is shared via zoom. Besides the slides and presenters’ audio, that also includes a camera at the back of the room for a real “participant’s view” (we use a tablet that individually joins the meeting for that purpose).
The Friday, 4 pm time-slot is ideal in that it allows us to recap the current week and get together for some social interaction afterwards without being too late in the evening where folks have left for their early weekend plans.
Every All-Hands meeting is recorded and available for the entire team to download.
COVID-Update: These are strange times and many teams face the challenges of suddenly working remotely where core-processes relied on physical presence before — the overwhelming amount of “surprised by home office” articles online prove the urgency.
Fortunately enough, our company has always been digital and fast changing. Experience with remote workshops, remote product demos, remote customer onboarding and remote management are part of our DNA. So moving the All-Hands into the digital space hasn’t been too much of a change. We use Zoom for our internal meetings and setting up a session with 35–40 participants is rather straightforward. I usually share the Zoom link a few minutes before the meeting in our central Slack channel and people keep dropping into the meeting at about the same rate they would at the office. With the “share audio” feature in Zoom, we even kept the music during that initial phase of the meeting.
We encourage everyone to enable their cameras, unless there is a really good reason not to. Being remote should not be an excuse to hide (you wouldn’t crouch behind the chairs at the office either, would you?) and the weekly collection of friendly faces helps to remind everyone that they’re part of a team.
Keeping remote All-Hands meetings personal
Official remote meetings with a large number of participants will never be able to duplicate the spontaneous serendipity of personal after-meeting beer or coffee discussions. However, sending participants into small random breakout rooms (4–7 people per room) after the meeting will facilitate meetings between team members who rarely meet on a day-to-day basis.
Facilitating an All-Hands meeting
The All-Hands is organised and hosted by myself or one of my co-founders in order to give it as much priority as possible. We usually put on some music until everybody is seated, in a good Friday mood and we’re ready to go. This includes getting beers or other drinks (alcoholic or otherwise) — the setting is both official and casual at the same time.
Whenever possible, I bring a little introduction. This can be anything from a press publication to a milestone we’re approaching or some other interesting side fact of our business that I’d like to mention or put into perspective. The goal here is to highlight small achievements and successes that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The actual agenda usually features 1–2 topics per All-Hands meeting, not more, in order to keep it focused. I introduce every topic individually and hand over to its presenter. Topics are usually prepared with a slide deck that I (mostly) receive on Thursdays before the All-Hands for feedback and can also feature live demos, video content from our campaigns etc. More on topics and how we find them later on.
Each presentation is followed by a short Q&A session. I usually close the All-Hands after 45–75 min with an outlook on next week’s upcoming topics.
General team announcements
We used to start or end the All-Hands with room for general announcements by anyone on the team — the temptation is great to allow that. However, these take away part of the official ‘event-style’ of the meeting and spontaneous announcements can really crash the mood (‘I’d like to announce that I’m leaving the team’ is a negative classic).
Hence, we’ve moved all announcements out of the All-Hands and either make them a complete presentation of their own or communicate them on some other channel (like our weekly founders’ update email).
How to find & curate topics for the All-Hands
Finding the right topics is the central aspect of keeping the All-Hands relevant. There are two major sources of topics. The first one is our management team. These are high-impact, long-term, company-wide topics that we want to introduce to the team. They make up around 20–30% of all presentations and get scheduled whenever they occur — everything else has to move out of the way, sometimes on short notice:
- Company & product strategy
- Organizational topics
- Finance & funding
The majority of presentations are team contributions. Their purpose is to celebrate achievements across teams, learn from failed projects and create a common understanding for the problems, tools and topics — i.e. the work — everybody else is doing to help us progress:
- Completed projects (successful or otherwise)
- General team updates (e.g. state of our support capacity)
- Introductions of new developments (designs, channels, technologies, product features etc.)
- Educational topics (e.g. an intro to influencer marketing, progressive web apps, doing sales calls)
We try to balance these topics to create a mix of learning, sharing and strategic announcements. While management topics arise more or less automatically from our strategic process, most other topics are added to the agenda by myself around 4–6 weeks in advance. I use our OKR-framework and direct calls with our team leads for inspiration and definition.
Recurring ‘every-week’ topics
A note on recurring topics. It is tempting to fill an All-Hands with weekly updates such as new customers, a standardised finance update etc. In fact, at times these repeat topics filled up to 30 minutes of our All-Hands. However, they eventually distract from the actual purpose of the meeting and, after a few repetitions, get very boring. Instead, we bring these up at special occasions (a special customer has joined, we’ve reached an important financial milestone) and within those exciting news, we also present a recap of the broader underlying topic. This way, every All-Hands meeting keeps its individual highlights and every topic gets the attention it deserves.
Make culture a part of the culture
As much as anything, All-Hands meetings are opportunities to lead by example (everybody is literally watching you, after all) and can influence team culture significantly. If you make them a safe space to voice an opinion, that impression will stick. So will it’s opposite.
A few years back, we were looking at a framework to continuously and consciously improve our office setting and parts of our office culture. My co-founder Lucas introduced us to a method called the ‘Improvement Kata’. We started using our All-Hands setting to develop a shared ‘Definition of Awesome’ for the way we’d like to work together and, over the course of several years, derived projects from it. These ranged from office decorations to team events to better noise isolation, workshop tools and desk equipment. ‘Office Culture’ has become a regularly recurring All-Hands topic (around once every 10–12 weeks).
How to deal with nervousness, encourage feedback and build team spirit
Sooner or later, every member of the team will have an opportunity to speak at an All-Hands. While giving speeches and demos is routine for some, others will build their very first slide deck for an All-Hands presentation.
Making everybody feel welcome and comfortable on stage is a top priority when organizing these meetings. An easy to use slide template, a mandatory feedback round with me before the presentation, an optional tech-test and the knowledge that “it’s everybody’s turn sometime” are important tools to make that happen.
Apart from pretty standard Q&A sessions, these ground rules allow us to open up the floor for improvement feedback after every presentation. Facilitated by myself, everybody is encouraged to give helpful feedback to the presenter. This can include the actual presentation style, slide deck, story line, duration and level of detail or any other aspect of the presentation, as long as the feedback is constructive and aimed at improvement. Rules we enforce for feedback rounds:
Giving feedback
- Feedback must be specific and constructive.
- Feedback must be addressed to the presenter directly.
Getting feedback
- While answering questions and giving perspective is valid, feedback on feedback is not.
- Feedback is like a buffet — there for the taking but only as much as you like.
The level of improvement we’ve seen for members joining the team in terms of confidence, presentation style and overall communication skills due to these practices is staggering — and a delight to watch. Not to mention the positive impact a safe space for feedback across hierarchies has on company and team culture.
Feedback in a remote-only setup
Since running the meeting digitally (due to covid restrictions), we’ve moved feedback to a dedicated digital whiteboard (we use Miro for that) with a section for each All-Hands meeting. The link to the board is shared with the All-Hands invitation and I keep reminding everyone in the meeting intro to leave their feedback.
Additionally, I randomly appoint two dedicated ‘Feedback Buddies’ for every All-Hands meeting to make sure that a minimum amount of feedback is available for our speakers. I’m usually surprised by the amount of participation and feedback on the board. We definitely get more response this way than we ever did the analog, outspoken way. 👌
Summing up
All-Hands meetings are a powerful tool to shape team culture and communicate strategic topics. They should be planned with care and handled by a founder or high-level management to give them as much weight as possible.
Both traditional and remote settings work well for productive and interactive meetings when the right set of tools is used.
Turning All-Hands meetings into a space for safe team-wide talks and open feedback can be a powerful tool to shape an empowering team culture.
Hi, I’m Tobi 👋, co-founder at HQLabs // awork.io where I head marketing & sales teams for two B2B-SaaS products. We’re a Hamburg, Germany based productivity company and love to build delightful products that help teams grow. While I hold a degree in mechanical engineering, I found my passion in entrepreneurship and team culture rather than mechanics. I firmly believe that we can improve our lives by unsucking work.
