How To Run An Engaging Town Hall Meeting

Introduction

Running an engaging virtual town hall meeting can feel like a daunting task.

You need to create a meeting that's informative, inspiring, and engaging. And, when everyone logs out of the meeting, they need to feel aligned, motivated, and ready to take on challenging company goals as one team.

That's a lot to ask when you only have screens and video tiles at your disposal.

With a little planning and the right approach, you can turn your next virtual town hall meeting into a powerful moment of connection and clarity for your team, no matter how far apart you are geographically.

So if you're struggling with virtual town hall meetings, or preparing to run your first, this article is for you.

Key Takeaways

What Is a Town Hall?

A company Town Hall is a meeting where leaders and executives meet with employees to discuss important topics, decisions, and plans. The purpose of this meeting is to make sure the entire company is aligned. A great Town Hall will leave employees feeling:

• Clarity in the direction of the company
• Trust in leadership and the decisions being made
• Motivation to tackle the top goals together as a team.

Virtual Town Hall Challenges

Instead of gathering in a physical space, virtual town hall meetings rely on video conferencing platforms - like Zoom or Microsoft Teams - to bring everyone together.

And this is usually the biggest challenges remote teams face when it comes to having engaging, effective Town Halls.

Traditional video conferencing tools were not designed to run remote teams. They don’t feel natural. They don’t foster engagement. They are completely devoid of your culture.

There are no tips that will solve these tools feeling clunky, unnatural and limiting how effective your virtual town hall meetings can be.

So the first step to running a great town hall meeting is to get the right meeting tool. This is where a virtual workspace comes in.

Must-Have Tools

A virtual workspace recreates the physical office, digitally. It gives your remote team a shared place to work beside each other. When you want to meet, you just walk up to someone.

Virtual workspaces like SoWork collapse video conferencing, culture tools, chat apps, analytics, AI meeting summaries, and more into one engaging tool. All housed in an office that looks and acts like your culture.

So if you're looking to host an engaging virtual town hall, this is the tool you're looking for.

Learn more about our virtual workspace: SoWork

Best Practices

1. Have a clear objective

What do you want to achieve in this virtual town hall meeting?

Pick topics

• Aligning the team around company goals
• Sharing important updates
• Reviewing the last quarter
• Celebrating recent successes

Define success

• The team understands and has committed to our goals
• Everyone has the information needed to know what's happening and make decisions
• We know how we performed against our last quarter's goals. We know what we want to keep doing, and what needs to be improved.
• The team feels appreciated and proud of the work they're doing.

2. Make a (detailed) agenda

What do you need to cover to achieve your virtual town hall meeting goal?

Break the meeting down into a clear, engaging agenda. This will ensure you make time for each topic, run a smooth meeting, and ultimately achieve your goal.

Here’s a simple guide

👋🏼 Welcome (5 minutes)

Start with a warm welcome to set a positive tone. Introduce any speakers or special guests.

📝 Company Updates (10-15 minutes)

Share key developments, performance metrics, and future company goals. Use visuals like slides or infographics for clarity.

👩🏽‍💼 Departmental Reports (15-20 minutes)

Provide updates from various departments or teams. Allow department heads to present their highlights and achievements.

🏓 Interactive Segment (10-15 minutes)

Incorporate activities like live polls, quizzes, or a brief virtual icebreaker to engage the audience.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Q&A Session (15-20 minutes)

Allocate time for questions from participants. Use a structured approach to ensure all questions are addressed

📈 Closing Remarks (5 minutes)

Summarize key points, highlight any follow-up actions, and express appreciation for everyone’s participation.

✨ Pro Tip ✨

Assign a moderator. Their job is to keep the meeting on track. They can share time updates, help with technical issues, and send out the summary and action items after the meeting.

3. Create a virtual-friendly presentation

Virtual meetings lack key things in-person meetings take for granted. So it's important your presentation accounts for these gaps.

Communicate clearly

In a virtual town hall meeting, you're tiles on a screen. It's going to be hard to read your team, and for them to read you.

So make sure your words, examples, and images are really clear. Avoid inside jokes, jargon, and anything ambiguous. This will help you avoid confusion that would likely go unnoticed in a virtual room.

Use great visuals

Screen sharing is one of the core interactive features in every virtual meeting. Effective use of screen sharing and visual aids can enhance your presentation.

Tools like PowerPoint, Prezi, and Canva can help you create visually appealing slides that complement your discussion.

SoWork let's teammates share emoji reactions throughout the meeting. This gives you real-time feedback and helps team members participate in what you're sharing.

4. Consider timezones

Finding a time that works for everyone can feel like a game of Tetris, especially when your team is spread across different time zones.

We recommend a virtual workspace - like SoWork - to solve this problem. You can see everyone's working hours and get suggested overlap blocks.

5. Share takeaways and next steps

The meeting doesn't end when the meeting ends. Well, technically it does. But you're not 'done' until you share a summary of the meeting and action items.

This ensures the goodness that came out of the town hall is acted on. Your remote team will see that their time and input was valued. And this will increase engagement in the next town hall.

If you're using a virtual workspace like Sowork, you can handle this automatically.

• Get meeting summaries, action items, and recordings for any meeting
• Review meeting summaries straight from the mobile app for easy catching up
• Walk up to teammates in the office after the meeting to ask questions or start working together on achieving a goal

Engaging Employees

Employee engagement during your meeting is the most important metric to focus on for a successful town hall.

How do you do it virtually?

1. Meet somewhere that feels like your culture

Think back to the in-person office. The layout, desk customization, decorations, themed rooms, logos, goals, and shared memories.

All of these elements come together to showcase company culture.

The office environment makes employees feel like they’re part of a team. Without a virtual workspace to fill that gap, your team will always feel like something's missing.

So, we suggest holding your virtual town hall meeting in a virtual workspace.

Spend some time setting it up to reflect your team, your culture. You'll be blown away at how much engagement increases just with this as the meeting backdrop.

(Check out this article for more information on the critical role a virtual workspace plays in employee engagement).

2. Start with icebreakers

Start your town hall with a 5-minute game for virtual meetings. This is a simple yet wildly effective way to get team members to switch gears from their execution work and get engaged in the meeting.

3. Recognize employee achievements

Publicly recognizing employee achievements during a town hall can boost morale and engagement.

Celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and significant milestones to show appreciation for your team’s hard work.

4. Encourage participation

If your team isn't already in the practice of participating in town hall meetings, they might need some encouragement.

Start with your leadership team: model the interaction you'd like to see. For example, encourage founders to bring strategic debates in front of the team to model open dialogue in your meeting.

Stop for questions: pause the meeting at key points and don't move on until a few questions have been asked. Show genuine appreciation for each question asked.

Include interactive components: ask team members to shout out answers to a question, put up a live poll, or include a quiz.

5. Get feedback

The best way to improve your virtual town hall meetings is to know what is and isn't working with today's meetings. Keep doing the good stuff, and spend your time solving the challenges.

📝 Send out a survey

💬 Ask managers to seek feedback in their next 1:1 meetings

👋🏼 Have informal chats with teammates to get their perspectives.

This is really easy if you have a virtual workspace. Pick a teammate to walk up to after the meeting and ask for their thoughts.

Final Thoughts

Running a successful virtual town hall meeting requires some planning, the right tools, and a focus on employee engagement.

Apps like Zoom or Microsoft Teams can make it challenging to foster engagement because they weren't created for remote environments. This is where virtual workspaces like SoWork come in. Just by using them, you'll supercharge your meeting engagement.

Combine the tips in this article with the right tools and you'll have an effective virtual town hall meeting!