How To Make Your Town Hall More Than A Standing Meeting
When properly designed, a town hall meeting allows leaders to share news and perspectives from the highest levels of an organization. These gatherings should also empower team members to ask questions of their leadership that explain how their company functions and makes decisions.
But far too often, town hall meetings don’t provide avenues for meaningful engagement or miss chances to allow employees to gain a clearer view of their companies. Here’s how your town halls can be an open forum for idea exchange and cultural building that bring your organization closer together.
1. Know, do feel
Most of us have thought after a particularly lackluster town hall meeting, “This could have been an email!”. Avoiding that feeling of meeting-induced malaise begins with preparing agendas that mesh with a leader’s communication style and preparing in advance to ensure that the point of the meeting gets through to attendees.
Ashley Pope, head of enterprise internal communications for Jackson, said comms should work with leaders to create talking points connecting to employees’ daily work.
“We use a ‘know, do, feel’ framework for town halls – clarifying with our stakeholders what attendees should know, what actions they should take with that information, and how they should feel walking out of the meeting,” Pope said.