According to our meeting effectiveness survey, 12% of respondents find meetings overcrowded, 17% say they run too long, and 10% believe they’re mostly unnecessary.
And can you blame them when nearly 50% of meetings last an hour or more?
But do they have to be that long? Can we not substitute these long and often unproductive meetings with quick, focused “meetings “SyncUps” instead?
The short answer: Yes, we can.
The long answer, or the how-to? That’s what this blog post is about!
Below, we show you how to replace all-hands check-ins on Zoom with a ClickUp SyncUp.
How to Replace All-Hands Check-Ins on Zoom With ClickUp SyncUp
- The Problem with Traditional All-Hands Meetings
- What Is a ClickUp SyncUp and Why It Works for All-Hands
- Creating async video updates with ClickUp SyncUps
- How to Host Async All-Hands Check-Ins Using a ClickUp SyncUp
- Benefits of Moving All-Hands to a ClickUp SyncUp
- Real-World Use Cases for Async All-Hands
- Best Practices for Async Company-Wide Check-Ins
- Make All-Hands Truly Inclusive with ClickUp SyncUps
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Problem with Traditional All-Hands Meetings
Before we talk about replacing all-hands meetings, let’s understand why Zoom meetings are no longer delivering consistent team alignment.
Scheduling hassles and time-zone conflicts
According to a Microsoft Work Trend survey, year-over-year meetings scheduled after 8 PM have increased by 16% among employees working across global time zones.
While workplace collaboration has become easier than ever, managing Zoom meetings across time zones has become exponentially harder. Someone on your team is always compromising their work hours to attend all-hands meetings.
Passive participation
Nearly 67% of the employees are distracted during virtual meetings. They are either checking phone emails, texting, daydreaming, surfing the Internet, or performing household chores.
Far from being interactive, most all-hands meetings end up dominated by the loudest voices. A small group speaks, a few react, and the rest stay muted.
Limited post-meeting visibility
What are the similarities between the least productive meetings?
- No follow-up notes, summaries, or action items shared after the meeting
- Meeting misses critical attendees, and decisions get stalled as a result
- No agenda or pre-reading material provided ahead of time
As per Calendly, they’re consistent across both internal and external meetings.
In other words, after a Zoom meeting, someone has to manually enter the action items, assign responsibilities, set deadlines, and add context to the project management tool.
This copy-pasting and context switching results in what we like to call Work Sprawl, where ideas, to-dos, and follow-ups are scattered across a jumble of tools—and which ends up costing teams over four hours per employee per week!
📮 ClickUp Insight: The results from our meeting effectiveness survey indicate that 42% of teams use recorded clips (21%) or project management tools (21%) for asynchronous work.
But these tools may often require additional tools, separate subscriptions, logins, and learning curves.
As the everything app for work, ClickUp makes asynchronous communication easier. Access video clips, voice messages, project workflows, collaborative docs, and a built-in AI notetaker—all within a single workspace.
Why manage multiple subscriptions and scattered information when a single solution can streamline your entire workflow?
💫 Real Results: Teams using ClickUp’s meeting management features report a whopping 50% reduction in unnecessary conversations and meetings!
Missed alignment opportunities
Not everyone can attend live. And even when they do, not everyone feels comfortable speaking up.
Key updates get shared once, in a single time-bound moment. Anyone who misses the meeting relies on second-hand summaries or incomplete recordings. Questions surface later in private chats, side threads, or follow-up calls.
One-way updates
Most all-hands remote meetings function as broadcasts. Leadership shares quarterly results, product announcements, or policy changes while everyone else listens.
This format forces people out of deep work to consume information that could have been reviewed asynchronously. A slide deck, a recorded update, or a short written brief would deliver the same message—without interrupting the day.
This wasted time doesn’t include the price of context switching. Research shows that it may take as long as 23 minutes to regain focus on a task once you’re pulled out of deep work.
👀 Did You Know? A seemingly harmless Zoom meeting is causing five distinct types of meeting fatigue: general, visual, social, motivational, and emotional. The Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale (ZEF Scale), developed by Stanford researchers, scientifically measures this phenomenon.
So what’s the solution to Zoom fatigue?
Below, we show you how to host an all-hands check-in asynchronously.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is a ClickUp SyncUp and Why It Works for All-Hands
A ClickUp SyncUp is an AI-powered meeting and collaboration tool that lets you start instant audio and video calls with your team within your ClickUp Workspace.
Launch one-on-one and group calls with your team to quickly resolve queries and blockers.
SyncUps are part of ClickUp Chat and are available on all plans, including the free plan. You can start a SyncUp from any ClickUp Chat DM or Channel. And also record the discussion and transcribe it with the ClickUp AI Notetaker.
Every recording stays tied to the relevant chat, ClickUp Task, or project. Turn discussions into trackable outcomes so they don’t get lost or forgotten.
Here’s how this aids clearer communication for your all-hands meetings:
Integrated context
The best part about SyncUps is their integration with your actual work. You can initiate a SyncUp within a specific Chat channel or direct message and keep your conversations anchored.
You can also share files and reference docs on a SyncUp call and attach specific Tasks relevant to the discussion.
📌 Example: The IT team is implementing new two-factor authentication requirements. During an all-hands SyncUp call, they demonstrate the setup process by sharing their screen and walking through common issues employees might face.
After the call, the SyncUp recording link is added to the IT security task and embedded directly inside a ClickUp Doc that serves as the official rollout guide. The Doc includes step-by-step instructions, screenshots, and FAQs, all kept in one place.
As updates come in, the Doc is revised instead of starting new conversations. Employees know exactly where to go for the latest guidance. The IT team avoids repeat questions or follow-up meetings. The result is a single, self-serve source of truth that stays connected to the work behind the rollout.
Even team members who weren’t on the call can watch the recording and pull up the exact document leadership referenced.
📮 ClickUp Insight: Knowledge workers send an average of 25 messages daily, searching for information and context. This indicates a fair amount of time wasted scrolling, searching, and deciphering fragmented conversations across emails and chats. 😱
If only you had a smart platform that connects task management, projects, chat, and emails (plus AI!) in one place. But you do: Try ClickUp!
AI-powered summaries and transcripts
The best part about SyncUps is that everyone gets to see the same SyncUp without needing to be online at the same time.
They can go through the recording, transcript, or summary to get context.
Everything, including updates, progress, and blockers, is accessible inside your ClickUp Tasks, Docs, and Chat.
⭐ Bonus: With ClickUp Enterprise AI Search, you can retrieve information from your notes inside your ClickUp workspace in seconds, and that too, using natural language prompts.
For instance, if you’ve been OOO for a week, you can just ask the AI assistant to get you meeting details and action items from last week’s SyncUp.
Native action items linked to Tasks
Accountability vanishes once your call ends on the Zoom app. But with ClickUp SyncUps, discussions can be quickly linked to trackable tasks, as everything lives inside the same workspace.
For example, if a meeting summary includes an action item, you can ask ClickUp Brain, ClickUp’s native AI assistant to create the relevant task using Workspace context.
👀 Did You Know? Back-to-back video meetings can cause cumulative stress in your brain. According to Microsoft’s neuroscience lab using EEG technology, just 10-minute breaks between meetings bring stress levels back to baseline. Traditional all-hands meetings rob your team of these crucial mental recovery periods.
Summarize this article for me pleaseCreating async video updates with ClickUp SyncUps
Not every update requires everyone in the company to attend the meeting.
📌 Example: Instead of scheduling a recurring design review meeting, the design lead records a short SyncUp video directly inside the Design Team Chat channel.
What happens:
- The designer records a 4-minute SyncUp walking through updated Figma screens
- They explain what changed, why it changed, and where feedback is needed
- The SyncUp is posted in the all-hands Chat channel linked to the relevant design task
How the team responds:
- PMs and engineers watch the video asynchronously
- Feedback comes in as threaded comments tied to the video
- Specific feedback is converted into follow-up tasks like “Update empty state” or “Explore alternate CTA color”
- No context is lost because the video, comments, and tasks live together
Why this works for design teams:
- Designers don’t have to repeat the same walkthrough multiple times
- Time zones stop blocking collaboration
- Decisions and design rationale are documented automatically
Anyone in the organization can open the recording to view the transcript or generate a summary. They can even drop questions directly in the Chat thread.
Always-on engagement
What do employees do when they have concerns while watching recorded SyncUps?
They can leave a timestamped comment on the video and assign it to the person who can specifically resolve that query. These comments remain visible on Clips Activity for everyone to refer to.
That said, all recorded SyncUps remain in the Clips Hub as ClickUp Clips.
Here’s how Clips help move async communication forward:
👀 Did You Know? 66% of meetings turn unproductive the moment employees stop sharing ideas. And it doesn’t take much—dismiss someone’s suggestion once during an all-hands, and they’ll stay quiet in the next five. That single discouragement creates a ripple effect, turning all your meetings unproductive.
📚 Read More: Morale-Boosting Employee Engagement Activities
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Host Async All-Hands Check-Ins Using a ClickUp SyncUp
Here’s how you can use a ClickUp SyncUp to share company-wide updates, without mandating everyone’s presence at an all-hands meeting.
Step 1: Set clear guidelines for all-hands communication
To make async communication successful, set clear communication guidelines.
Create a structured ClickUp Doc setting clear communication guidelines. Clarify:
- Which type of meetings are mandatory and require live attendance, and which ones are optional (watch the recording later)
- How far in advance should all-hands SyncUps be scheduled for global teams
- Should employees join live calls outside their work hours, or is watching the recording acceptable
- How team members should acknowledge they’ve seen the message or update
- How quickly should comments on all-hands SyncUp recordings be addressed
- Where all archived all-hands content lives, and how to search for past updates
- Response timeframes to messages (high-priority within 4 hours, standard updates within 24 hours)
Once that’s documented, map out which communication strategies (Clips, SyncUp, Chat message) fit different scenarios. Here’s a framework:
| Update type | Format | How is it effective? |
| Quarterly results, strategic pivots | Clips and Docs | Gives people time to analyze numbers and think through implications before asking questions |
| Product demos, feature walkthroughs | Clips with screen share | Teams can pause, replay complex steps, and reference the exact workflow when implementing |
| Organizational restructuring, leadership changes | Live SyncUp (short) + follow-up Clip | Real-time Q&A addresses concerns immediately, Clip provides a permanent reference for those who missed it |
| Weekly wins and milestones | Chat message or live SyncUp | Depending on how your team is structured and what they prefer—quick async updates work for distributed teams, live celebrations suit tight-knit groups |
| Urgent policy changes | Optional all-hands SyncUp with recordings | Time-sensitive decisions need immediate clarification and alignment across the organization |
⚡ Template Archive: Free Project Communication Plan Templates: Excel, Word, & ClickUp
Step 2: Share the agenda before the meeting
Share a clear meeting agenda with your team members at least 48-72 hours prior over email and Chat channels.
Your agenda should include:
- What will be discussed in the all-hands meeting and why it’s happening now
- Attach ClickUp Docs or reports that team members should review before the meeting
- Time breakdown for each segment, so people know when their input is needed
- Pre-submitted questions that employees want answers to—especially helpful for people who can’t attend in real time but want their concerns addressed in the recording
- Key decisions that need to be made and who’s responsible for making them
- Expected outcomes of the meeting
⭐ Bonus: Don’t lose your stellar ideas to sticky notes and voice recordings. Dictate your meeting agenda using ClickUp Talk to Text and have it transcribed and formatted instantly in a ClickUp Doc.
Step 3: Launch and record your SyncUp
Start a SyncUp straight from:
- A Channel
- A DM
- Views in a location that has a Chat Channel associated with it
To capture your session, hit the record icon.
You can add participants by sharing the SyncUp link or inviting them.
✏️ Note: If you’re hosting an all-hands with more than 200 people, you may want to use the ClickUp Zoom integration to schedule a Zoom meeting instead.
Just type /Zoom in the ClickUp Chat channel, and it’ll generate a meeting link that integrates with your workspace.
⚡ Template Archive: Free Project Management Templates for All Types of Projects
Step 4: Summarize outcomes with ClickUp Brain
After your SyncUp is recorded, open it in the Clips Hub and click Summarize to have ClickUp Brain or BrainGPT generate a concise summary of the discussion.
Use ClickUp Brain to:
- Summarize key announcements, decisions, and updates from the SyncUp
- Extract action items and convert them into Tasks with owners and due dates
- Highlight risks, dependencies, or follow-ups mentioned during the call
- Create a short “what you need to know” recap for people who couldn’t attend
💡 Pro Tip: Use Super Agents, ClickUp’s AI-powered teammates, to save time, boost productivity, and adapt to your Workspace with intelligence and human-like interactions.
Super Agents excel at meeting management workflows like these:
- Creative briefs: Drafting creative briefs using the context of a task or Chat, including actionable improvements to standardize intake and accelerate approvals
- Feature briefs: Converting feature requests into structured briefs, enabling Agile teams to align scope, estimate time efficiently, and reduce rework
- Follow-up emails: Turning AI Notetaker meeting notes into concise, client-ready follow-up emails, capturing decisions, owners, and due dates for clear next steps
Check out more such meeting agents for your team:
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits of Moving All-Hands to a ClickUp SyncUp
Here’s why ClickUp SyncUps are the best Zoom alternative:
- Zero app switching: Integrate work and communication in a single tool, enabling you to launch fully contextual meetings without switching apps. At times when teams are drowning in AI Sprawl, this is a major time-saver
- Built-in accountability: Ask Brain to create and assign tasks based on SyncUp discussions, so every conversation gets an actionable takeaway. Turns your all-hands meetings into productive and non-repetitive discussions
- Converged AI Workspace: Connect tools, files, and workflows in a unified platform with ClickUp. All your company knowledge lives in one place, indexed and easy to search
- Cost efficiency: SyncUps are accessible from mobile devices and available even on free plans, allowing the smallest of teams to hold virtual meetings without an extra cost
- Workflow automation: Save manual back and forth and ends inconsistent meeting notes
- Async first approach: Accelerate async communication with audio/video Clips, automatic transcripts, AI-generated summaries, and timestamped comments for questions or feedback
⚡ Template Archive: Org Chart Templates in PPT, Word, & ClickUp
👀 Did You Know? People nodding on camera isn’t a sign of agreement—it’s often conformity. Research shows that individuals conform to majority opinions during professional online meetings when their cameras are on. Apparently, Zoom fatigue amplifies significantly when employees are forced to keep their cameras on.
Summarize this article for me pleaseReal-World Use Cases for Async All-Hands
Async communication is practical, and leading companies across the world have implemented async approaches to deliver company-wide updates:
GitLab
GitLab is known for a handbook-first, async-by-default communication model, with clear guidance on how company-wide information should be shared and consumed. Key principles include:
- Documentation before discussion
Company updates, decisions, and processes are written down in the GitLab Handbook so everyone can access the same source of truth asynchronously - Async communication over live meetings
Updates are designed to be consumed across time zones, reducing reliance on real-time meetings wherever possible - Recorded and written updates for broad visibility
Important meetings or announcements are often recorded and/or summarized in writing so team members can catch up on their own schedule - Clear expectations for meetings
Every meeting requires a pre-shared agenda (“no agenda, no attenda”), often using a live document so people can contribute asynchronously or skip the meeting entirely if not needed - Tooling supports transparency, not silos
Work updates, planning, and capacity discussions are typically tracked in documented issues, pages, or projects rather than private conversations or undocumented spreadsheets
Zapier
Zapier is a fully remote, distributed company with a long-standing culture of asynchronous communication designed to support teams across time zones. Their communication practices include:
- Emphasizing async collaboration before scheduling live meetings, so discussions and prep work are completed ahead of time
- Using tools like Async (their internal blog-style platform) and Slack to share updates, context, and company information that teams can read and reply to on their own time
- Encouraging asynchronous prep (including screen recordings or recorded walkthroughs) to help reduce unnecessary live meetings; live sessions are used when real-time interaction adds value beyond what async provides
- Operating as a 100% distributed, remote workforce, which inherently shapes how communication and company-wide updates are delivered
📚 Read More: Best OKR Software for Teams
Summarize this article for me pleaseBest Practices for Async Company-Wide Check-Ins
Async communication frees your team from the need to be online all the time.
That said, we’ve converted the best practices into a checklist—refer to it when you’re sharing company-wide updates asynchronously:
🤝 Set clear expectations
- Define which all-hands require live attendance and which can be watched later
- Set response timeframes (e.g., urgent updates within 4 hours, standard updates within 24 hours)
- Clarify how employees should acknowledge updates (comment, reaction, task completion)
🧠 Centralize company-wide updates
- Use a dedicated company-wide ClickUp Chat channel
- Store agendas, recordings, Clips, summaries, and follow-ups in one place
- Avoid scattering updates across email, Slack, and DMs
📆 Standardize recurring updates
- Create ClickUp Doc templates for quarterly and monthly all-hands
- Use fixed sections for metrics, priorities, risks, and Q&A
- Reduce prep time and help employees know what to expect every time
💬 Match the format to the message
- Clips for product demos and walkthroughs
- Chat threads for quick wins and announcements
- SyncUps for strategic updates or sensitive discussions
✅ Automate follow-ups
- Create reminders for watching recordings or responding to threads
- Automatically archive resolved tasks
Summarize this article for me pleaseMake All-Hands Truly Inclusive with ClickUp SyncUps
Traditional all-hands meetings exclude people by design. Whoever can’t make the time slot misses out.
With remote work and geographically distributed teams, asynchronous communication has become equally important.
Companies thrive when they balance synchronous conversations with asynchronous workflows, tailored to each situation.
ClickUp SyncUps allows you to get the best of both worlds. Ready to replace all-hands Zoom meetings with SyncUps? Sign up on ClickUp for free to get started.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
