Optimize Leadership Q&A in Town Halls to Engage and Build Employee Trust
From CommPRO:
PR professionals stand to gain valuable insights from a recent Ragan and HarrisX survey, which underlines the critical role of employee communications in adding value to organizations. Despite its importance, communications leaders recognize the need for improvement in this area. Town hall meetings, especially in their virtual format since 2020, emerge as pivotal platforms for engaging employees, with the Q&A segment with leaders being a crucial yet often overlooked component.
Valerie Di Maria, principal at the 10 company, shares strategies on optimizing leadership Q&A to foster genuine dialogue, build trust, and engage employees effectively. She emphasizes the importance of understanding employee perspectives, structuring town halls to allow ample time for questions, and rehearsing to ensure clarity and relevance in responses. Moreover, Di Maria discusses the pros and cons of anonymous questions and the benefits of pre-submitted questions in preparing leaders to address real employee concerns.
This article offers practical advice for PR leaders to enhance town hall meetings, making them more interactive and meaningful. It stresses the significance of direct leadership-employee interaction in building a transparent, inclusive, and communicative organizational culture. PR professionals looking to refine their internal communications strategy and foster a more engaged workforce should consider these insights for their next town hall.
In last fall’s Ragan and HarrisX survey, communications leaders and CEOs both rated employee communications as the top way to bring value to their organizations — but comms leaders also said it’s the top function their org needed to improve on.
While there are many forums and touchpoints for directly reaching your employees, none have the potential to engage them quite like a town hall meeting. Since many town halls went virtual in 2020, savvy comms leads have monitored employee engagement around these events to figure out what messages, cadence, formats and overall approaches resonate best with their workforces.
Among the various elements that make up a successful town hall, Q&A time with your leaders is crucial but often under-considered. These forums provide employees with direct access to executives and, when done right, build trust by connecting your leadership’s personality and answers back to the organization’s culture and goals. Q&As are a time to get out in front of concerns, revealing qualitative insights on prevailing employee sentiment while humanizing business decisions through your leaders’ experiences.
