What do you prefer - Broadcasting One to many or engaging everyone?

With around 300 people working in different geographical locations across the globe, we wanted to find a way to reach, engage, and involve the associates.

We realized sharing big-picture information and to maintain alignment concerning unit goals is critical these days since we can’t get together in person.Associates would be interested to see how we’re doing against our goals and where we’re heading.

We wanted to share important information, celebrate team accomplishments, get feedback, ask and answer questions in real-time.With associates working from home from last three months, we can see disconnect, discomfort, coming out in one way or the other.

So during this pandemic, we came up with the idea of holding a virtual townhall meeting.

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Townhall meetings are always an opportunity for leadership to build a sense of community, trust, and fun with their employees. It boosts morale, encourages collaboration, and helps in building trust via transparency and clarity.

It is a valuable way for employees to hear from leaders and bring people together from various locations and functions, hence they create a sense of community.

But holding it virtually with 300+ associates, frankly speaking, we were not very confident. We had many apprehensions like:

Will it work logistically? Will we able to engage employees remotely/virtually? Will the message reach out effectively?

I can recall our first huddle for town-hall was a complete mess with various collaboration tools being proposed, multiple challenges/ issues being discussed, identification of host, speakers, and agenda items looks like a big list of groceries.

At that point in time, it looked, one month will not be enough to prepare for it but guess what, we did our first virtual town-hall within a fortnight.

How that happens & how do we create a meaningful townhall experience virtually? The first thing we did was splitting the this meeting in 3 phases:

1. Before the Meeting 
2. During the Meeting
3. After the Meeting

Under, before the meeting part:

A.     Host Identification - Host is an essential element of a successful virtual meeting that manages the collaboration tool, anchor the presentation, act as in charge of the schedule, the topics covered, and the timings.

B. Lean Agenda & Storytelling - What is the one thing I need this town hall to accomplish?

We have a lot many things to cover in this town hall but we restricted ourselves to top three items. We went deep instead of covering a wide range of topics. Then built a story arc around our three key objectives.

C.     Backup – Risk Mitigation - We identified backups for the host, speakers, moderator so as network glitches, hardware failure, collaboration tool disconnect/logoff cannot spoil the game. It also helped since during our townhall itself, one of our Q&A anchors did face challenges & backup immediately took over even before the audience realized.

D.     Collaboration Tool Selection - We selected Webex that’s quick and seamless to join. We picked a platform that doesn’t require any downloads or set up to start. All associates just need to do, is click a meeting invitation link to join..

E.    Time Window - Since teams were distributed, we tried to mitigate time zone issues by scheduling the meetings at 5:30 IST, so the majority of the team can make it during business hours.

F.      Invite – Well in Advance - The day we got concurrence from top leadership, we shared the townhall invite with the team. It allows the team to plan their schedule accordingly.

G.      Practice to Perfection (Inspect & Adapt) - To keep technology challenges at bay with no surprises in screen sharing, video streaming & to enable seamless flow from one speaker to another requires some prep work. It can look simple but it doesn’t work that way. I recall during our first dry run, many surprises get unfolded. But the whole team moderators, speakers work tirelessly to work on the challenges & streamlining it. More than seven dry-runs give us the required confidence of going and this served as one of the pillar of our success.

Under, During the Meeting:

A.     Setting out Ground Rules - Clearly laid out the rules of participation, explaining how one can interact.

B.     Agenda and Purpose - The first slide we shared is an agenda slide, hence setting out clear purpose, structure, and goals for the meeting.

C.     Variety of Speakers - To spice things up, we involved presenters from different departments and leadership levels. We started the meet with the unit head keynote followed by segment head. With delivery head moderating the flow, HR heads enabled associates in navigating through challenges that arise due to pandemic & how continuous learning is the key to success. Then we moved to a much-awaited section of celebrating success & milestones with Q&A at the end. Every section is lead by different speakers adding variety rather than sounding monotonous.

D.    Celebrating Success - A townhall is a perfect opportunity to show your team members how much you value them. Acknowledging their best work in front of the entire account & unit leadership can go a long way toward making them feel appreciated. So we spent a considerable amount of time on recognizing top performers & celebrating milestones achieved.

E.      Keep it Simple, Stupid - The focus was to keep the message simple, understandable, and to the point which is very much appreciated by the team.                          

F.      Choreograph Participation - Every participant is enabled to make comments throughout the meeting via the chat feature. It takes a bit of work to facilitate this but the effort pays off. The objective we want to accomplish is attendee’s active participation & we had our share our success in form of tons of comments.

G.     Q&A to allow the team to engage - Townhall meetings are a two-way street. We enable associates to share their thoughts/questions via chat. We provided a platform to submit questions during & after the town hall about any topics that came up.

Under, After the Meeting:

A.     Survey/Poll/Feedback - The survey has been posted immediately after the townhall completion so as feedback can be captured & improved areas can be identified.

B.     Respecting every Question Asked - We make sure all the unanswered questions asked & that were not answered online due to time constraints were responded post townhall.

Effective Townhalls are the ones in which employees engage, enabling the leadership to take the pulse of the team without the filter of surveys or other mechanisms.

Are you still in planning phase ... go get it & share your engaging journey.