All Hands meetings serve as a consistent team gathering and knowledge sharing opportunity for small startups and large global organizations alike. When done right, it’s a chance for leadership to address the most pressing topics and major milestones across all teams and timezones.

When done wrong, they can take up massive amounts of collective time and effort. Plus, poorly-organized events and unengaged audiences can have a negative impact on company morale and culture.

If you’ve ever been in the driver’s seat of producing a large scale All Hands event—or any event really—you know what I’m talking about. It’s a high stakes, high reward endeavor. All Hands meetings are a commitment.

While getting it right takes diligent planning and cross-functional coordination, there’s no better opportunity to directly address and impact every employee at your organization. Your team will thank you!

7 Best Practices for All Hands Meetings

1. Design your meetings to hear consistently from the CEO and rotate in other members of leadership to give org-specific updates
2. Pass the mic to emerging leaders, ERGs (Employee Resource Groups), remote employees, and your internal culture champions
3. Send out weekly reminders with updated agendas in advance
4. Engage the whole company with Q&A topics they submit and upvote 🔼  or downvote 🔽
5. Ensure your tech setup is optimized for remote viewing and recording
6. Rehearse each segment with presenters ahead of time ( 🎤 check 1, 2…)
7. Send the team a feedback survey, event recording, and slide deck directly following the event

Making the Time Commitment

I know what you’re probably thinking: “Really, all of that for one hour?”

As a growing company, you may have been able to get away with casual team meetings that were prepared on the fly.  As you expand, however, it’s worth the investment of time and money to level up your events.

Luckily, the tools for internal communication, project management, and remote team events have never been better.

Template for All Hands Meeting

Here's how to build a workflow to make All Hands meetings that engage every member of your team while getting valuable insight into their questions and concerns.

Start by helping your team out with automated reminders and to-do lists that can be marked as completed directly in Slack. (See our guide on writing effective Slack announcements!)

Below, we’ve created an automated reminder you can use for updating the All Hands agenda and sending out the weekly Q&A. We like Slido for crowdsourcing Q&A questions.  It gives your whole company the ability to submit their recent questions, as well as upvote or downvote submissions from their team members. Don’t worry, it’s anonymous.

Or, you can set up a Slack message that goes out to everyone on a recurring basis.

Just grab this template and customize it with your relevant dates and team alias.

Scatterbrained post-event? With Gather, you can tee up reminders to send your follow up email – so you won’t miss a thing!

You can even include a button that delivers you, or a person on your team, to a pre-populated email draft.

Simply click on the All Hands Follow Up Template button →

And you’ll land in a ready-to-use email draft. Just don’t forget to update the links 🔗

If you’re completely new to All Hands planning, a great place to start is getting a small task force of people together and coordinating your efforts with a dedicated Slack channel.

Bonus points for having a team member from a different timezone join.

This will help you make sure things are going smoothly for remote viewers on the day of the event. You want to be sure global team members are having a positive experience as well 🌏

Ultimately, we recommend starting small and ramping up your All Hands production gradually. By adding one or two new operational elements at a time, you can take your operation to the next level without significant stress.