The Importance of All-Hands Meeting Activities

All-hands meeting activities can be tacky and boring. Yet, all-hands meetings are the only time you will sit down with the people who make an organization truly great. It’s a time to connect with your team. A time to re-assess the targets, goals, and mission that propel the organization into the future. Aligning your goals is crucial to making sure everybody is working towards the same objective. Finally, these meetings can help to make sure employees are more productive. Another benefit of having regular all-hands meetings is that it increases team spirit and culture. Your employees have time to reconnect and bond with each other, share their accomplishments, and feel praised in the organization. Improved all-hands meetings help employees to showcase their work. With the right all-hands meeting activities, fellow team members can help other employees out with their problems, thus fostering team collaboration.

6 Tips For Better All-Hands Meeting Activities

While all-hands meetings are typically a straightforward activity, the suggestions in this article will help you set up these monthly meetings in a way that empowers your employees and encourages them to improve the quality of their work. Use these top six tips to help you plan your next all-hands meeting. They are easy for any manager to implement in any of their meetings on a routine basis.

Ensure That Everyone Involved Is Prepared

To ensure that your all-hands meetings don’t come as a surprise to anyone, set a fixed day each month to make sure employees are prepared. Any HR professional would recommend that you set up a date each month for employees to keep their schedules clear so that you have sufficient time to plan for your meeting. Fixing the date also sets an expectation. Team members know that their department will be reviewed on a monthly basis. They can prepare for the session in advance by taking stock of the work they have done. The employees of your business or firm will look forward to all-hands meetings if there is a fixed date in their calendar. Generally, organizations have all-hands meetings at the beginning or end of the month since this makes it easy to close out the work done the month before and set down priorities for the upcoming month.

Set The Agenda A Week In Advance

An agenda for your all-hands meeting is crucial to ensuring a smooth meeting. Your agenda can contain the following items:

• First of all, take a few minutes to set the expectations for the month ahead, talking about the targets you need to hit organization-wide as well as department-wide.
• Communicate the schedule for the meeting within the first five minutes.
• Use the first fifteen to thirty minutes for an ice-breaker activity.
• Take stock of the needs and pains of your employees with a fast feedback session. This time can also be utilized by employees to offer suggestions on service or product features and upgrades.
• Cater a team lunch and treat the complete team to a well-deserved meal.
• Let people from different departments talk about the work done by their team in the previous month with a demo session. This can be the longer session within your all-hands, but it can be very informative.
• You could raise spirits by giving an update about major accomplishments from the month prior.
• Finally, let employees ask questions and gain more clarity from upper management with an Ask Me Anything session.

If your strategy to re-align the team to the mission and goals of the company, make sure that the agenda reflects this objective. Setting expectations on an organizational level should be done at the very beginning of the meeting, when energy and spirits are high.

A Fun Ice-Breaker Session

Your all-hands meetings do not have to be all work. Just for fun, begin the meeting with light activity. Your ice-breaker session can be an interactive game or a discussion. For instance, you can have everybody share a fun activity they enjoy doing outside of work. Or, you can make employees play some games to boost their morale. Starting things off with some all-hands meeting activities gives your employees time to interact with each other. It gets them to loosen up after a long month of hard work.

Rotate The Moderator

Having the same moderator for every meeting is boring. It also never allows other members of your team to shine. One of the easy ways to spice up your all-hands meetings, and make them interesting for all your employees, is to rotate your moderator. Assign one employee each month to lead the meeting and carry the agenda forward. You can also ask your team to volunteer or pick employees who have a big project to present.

Make The Meetings Enjoyable

Engaged and happy employees are more likely to internalize what will be presented. Your all-hands meetings may be productive and efficient. However, that does not mean they are something that employees always look forward to. After all, it is still another meeting they have to sit through. To mitigate some of the inevitable dread, try to pair your meeting with something enjoyable that employees will be happy about. This could be easily hosting your all-hands meeting toward the end of the day and providing free beverages and snacks for participants. Providing lunch, if the meeting takes place during or around lunch hours, is also a great way to spark joy.

Demo Sessions

One of the better ways to present information in most all-hands meetings is through a demo session. In a demo, one team member from every department gets to demonstrate the work done by the department. They also get to explain their next steps and plans. Demo sessions help to create transparency across departments and give everybody a clear outlook on what is happening within the company. Developers cannot know about the tools that the marketing team is building unless they are demonstrated to them! Meanwhile, the creative team can be at a loss on certain issues that the developers are also trying to resolve. This is where demo sessions come in handy. Having clarity about the work that everybody is engaged in lets employees take an interest in the projects of other departments. Then, they can contribute to these projects and help each other out. This transparency will make employees more motivated to do more within the organization.

This, along with other creative all-hands meeting activities, can certainly help create organizational efficiencies.

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Kristina Ousmanova

Kristina recently left behind fast-paced life of Human Resource Business Consulting to freelance as a Content Writer. A regular Vacation Tracker contributor, she can be found working remotely from her home in Montreal, usually while eating a variety of snacks.