Town Hall Meetings

WHY HOST A TOWN HALL: CHANGE MANAGEMENT FOR YOUR TEAM

Town hall meetings are a great way to provide transparency and build alignment around strategy, tactics, and values at your startup. Since change is inevitable and happens often in startups, you may want to host town hall meetings twice a year to bring everyone together and share insights on bigger-picture issues at the whole company level.

As the CEO or C-Suite, you think about where the company is heading all of the time. It’s on your mind 24/7. However, the rest of your team is typically much further behind. Most founders don’t realize how often you have to leave breadcrumbs to signify new areas of future growth and development for the company. Although leaders frequently feel like they’ve been talking and talking about this big thing that is coming up, the rest of the team needs a range of communications in a variety of formats and structures to understand and get ready for change.

WHEN TO HOST A TOWN HALL: JANUARY (Q1) + JUNE (Q3)

If you are following the quarterly goal-setting process and timeline, you may want to host town hall meetings in late January and June, after you’ve completed the annual goal-setting process and mid-year goal-setting as well. That way you can share with the whole company what the annual goals are for the year, how it’s going at the midpoint, and allude to future initiatives and changes that are coming down the road.

TOWN HALL STRUCTURE TIPS

Solicit questions from all in advance

In advance of your town hall meeting, you may want to solicit questions from the whole company anonymously. You can encourage people to add their names so that you can credit them in the meeting but sometimes people feel safer with the option to leave their name out if they choose. The prompts may be something like: What do you want to hear the CEO discuss? What is on your mind? What questions and concerns do you have right now?

Make sure to review all of your team’s questions in advance to look for patterns and trends and to bring several of these questions to the town hall to address directly.  It’s important to acknowledge that the questions came in from the community so that they feel heard.

Prep a few slides

If the town hall is one hour, you want to plan on talking for no more than 20 minutes. Make sure you have a few slides ready to help facilitate the discussion.

Consider the following structure:

  • Welcome - Start right on time and give a warm welcome. [5 minutes]

  • Good news - Highlight some of the new people and initiatives that have happened since you last met. Share some great news that will lift team morale. [5 minutes]

  • Strategy updates - Give a few big-picture updates on where the company is heading and why. These may be repurposed slides from a recent board meeting or custom-made slides for this purpose. [10 minutes]

  • Pre-screened questions - State the questions and answer them, making sure the group knows that the questions came from them. [15 minutes]

  • Live questions - Open yourself up to answer live questions. [15 minutes]

  • Wrap up + next steps - Have closure and share any next steps with the group. [5 minutes]

PROVIDE HYBRID ACCESS + RECORD MEETINGS

In order to be truly inclusive, you may want to structure your town hall as a hybrid meeting so that folks can attend in person or remotely. By providing a Zoom link you can record the meeting and share it immediately after the meeting for anyone who wanted to attend but was unable to. It’s also a great practice to watch yourself to learn what you could improve upon for the next town hall meeting in the future - although it’s not necessarily enjoyable to watch yourself!

SOME CONSIDERATIONS:

You may want to consider inviting other people to present at the town hall or to answer questions so that it’s not just you, the CEO, and everyone else. Maybe your leadership team takes turns answering questions, too. Whatever you do, make sure it’s seamless so that it’s clear who is doing what and you’re not awkwardly navigating who is speaking when.

You also may want to spotlight bright spots during your town hall. Who has been doing exceptional work? Town hall meetings are a great way to involve your board members if they are interested and to highlight culture and value norms that you want to reinforce across the company.