The All Hands meeting template in SoWork is a simple path to a successful and productive team meeting.

All Hands meetings help foster open communication and celebration within your team. Also called a Town Hall, they’re a great way to stay up to date on your organization’s goals, celebrate wins, and ask questions about company happenings. They’re usually run by a team lead, occur on a regular cadence, and all folks in the company attend.

In SoWork, All Hands empower and engage teammates, leaving them feeling informed and excited about the work they’re doing and the goals they’re striving toward.

4 Benefits of Using the All Hands Meeting Template

1️⃣ Feeling like you’re really together

By using the SoWork All Hands template, your team will truly feel like you’re sitting beside each other in a real office. You’re able to see when the meeting is gathering, sit beside your favourite co-worker, and grab people on the way out the door when the meeting ends.

2️⃣ Celebrating your team’s accomplishments

Teams often begin All Hands meetings with celebrating large and small wins or sharing good news. This helps start the meeting with positive energy and helps it flow throughout the rest of the session.

At SoWork, we typically share a milestone celebration, a launch of a new feature or initiative, cheerful feedback from a customer, or shoutout a team’s amazing work. Using SoWork’s All Hands template, your team can blast emojis (and even a teammate’s avatar), to celebrate progress. Calling out your organization’s successes and learnings are useful ways to elevate happenings within the company.

3️⃣ Creating and maintaining company-wide alignment

A fundamental part of an All Hands meeting is the news and announcements.

Executives and Team Leads can share anything that would affect the team as a whole, such as product changes, feature updates, upcoming projects, or recent customer insights. These announcements are typically brief, with more in-depth topics covered in a presentation later in the meeting. Presentations help educate everyone in the company of various team’s tasks and initiatives, facilitating company-wide support.

A Q&A section in an All Hands meeting is also quite instrumental for company alignment, and is often a great way to end the session. When company founders lead the Q&A, it provides an opportunity for folks to have their burning questions answered and feel more aligned to the broader organization. These questions could be about anything on their mind or something that was covered earlier in the All Hands.

4️⃣ Meeting Summaries via Sophia Bot, SoWork’s generative AI Office Assistant

By using SoWork’s All-Hands template, you’ll benefit from Sophia Bot having your back. Sophia Bot creates AI generated Meeting Summaries, which means the important aspects of your meeting will be captured in writing.

When the All Hands meeting begins, click the Sophia Bot icon under your video tile - you’ll then see Sophia Bot begin typing. From here, your meeting content is being transcribed and summarized automatically, and a note with your Meeting Summary will be available to you and your team within minutes of the meeting ending. You’ll also see perfectly crafted action items at the bottom of your All Hands summary.

How’s that for efficiency?

You can access Sophia Bot’s notes at any point after the meeting, and these notes will be stored within your personal Meeting Summaries Codex on the SoWork app.

How to Use the All Hands Meeting Template

After clicking on the button below, we’ll guide you through a quick onboarding flow, where we’ll make a virtual office. Your meeting template will be inside this office. After onboarding, you’ll land in your template, ready to try it out with your team!

At SoWork, because we work beside each other in a virtual office, we’re able to see when people start gathering around before the meeting begins. So, when others in the office see their teammates collecting in the meeting area a few minutes early, they know they’re welcome to walk over and catch up.

When the All Hands meeting begins, we follow our pre-established agenda, while giving time for extra context and answering questions from the team. We always celebrate our successes and orient around our quarter goals. With the All Hands meeting template, you’re able to use SoWork’s AI generated Meeting Summaries (created by Sophia Bot).

This Smart Office tool allows you to get the most out of your All Hands by providing clear, section by section summaries and tidy action items. With SoWork’s Sophia Bot, you have your next priorities lined up right away, saving you time and energy.

After the All Hands meeting is finished, we often break off into spontaneous conversations to discuss the meeting content further.

FAQs

✨ How do I get the most out of my All Hands meeting, and what’s the best way to prep? ✨

With the SoWork All Hands meeting template, you’re able to collect early, and linger around afterwards, because you’re in a virtual office! Your team can literally see that the CEO is still taking questions, or that the engineering team is gathering around post-All Hands to discuss an exciting project. So you can jump in!

This buzzing office energy fosters deeper connections, spontaneous conversations, and ideation that drives innovation, and just isn’t possible on a scheduled Zoom or Teams call.

When scheduling your All Hands, it’s best to pencil-in your meeting during working hours, rather than an evening after work or over lunch, and ensure that you find a time that works for most of your team to attend.

You can also get the most out of your All Hands by preparing an agenda beforehand. This way, you know exactly what you’re covering, in which order, and how long you’d like each section to take.

Many teams share their meeting agenda with their teammates and leads well before the All Hands so they’re able to add in their own announcements, questions, celebrations, and updates.

1. Most teams start with celebrations/shoutouts, then move on to announcements, any presentations you’d like to show, and then ending with a question and answer period. To organize shoutouts, everyone who’d like to give a shoutout puts their name in the meeting agenda, as their name is called they shoutout the team member they’d like to recognize and their specific efforts or accomplishments.

2. Teams generally keep their announcements section short and sweet, but can open up for questions after this period as well if needed.

3. Presentations can be as long or as short as you’d like them to be, though most teams keep them succinct. These are a lovely way to show teammates recognition and highlight their impactful work.

4. Q&A: it’s best to have these written down beforehand, but some teams prefer to just let this part flow. At SoWork, we provide a platform for teammates to submit their questions to before the All Hands meeting, while also allowing plenty of time for questions that arise as the meeting goes on. This not only creates a designated time to address questions, but it also ensures no questions fall through the cracks during the course of the meeting.

5. Using SoWork’s Sophia Bot - AI generated meeting notes are a fantastic way to get the most out of your All Hands meeting. With these, you’re able to obtain a Meeting Summary after your meeting, get started on your generated action items, and review these notes whenever needed by accessing your Meeting Codex inside your SoWork Office. Yay, productivity!

✨ What do I do after my All Hands meeting? ✨

Encourage teammates to ask any questions that come up afterwards, and because the All Hands took place in SoWork, you can grab a teammate and ask a quick question, or let them know you were inspired by something raised and want to get going on it.

All Hands meetings are great for sparking ideas and facilitating cross-team collaboration. After the meeting, you can also review the action items Sophia Bot generated for you, and organize any of your related tasks or work blocks. With your All Hands meeting in a virtual office, your team can literally end the meeting ‘walking out together’ - engaging in those spontaneous conversations that foster bonding and innovation.