All-hands meetings are a smart way to quickly share information with all of the people and departments in your business. But these meetings have a lot of attendees, which means they can quickly run off the rails without a solid plan in place.
Whether you have five people in the meeting or 500, it’s best to create a game plan to run the most productive all-hands meeting possible.
Use this step-by-step guide to plan meaningful and engaging all-hands meetings for your team, plus get some free templates to maximize your efforts. Let’s go! 🙌
How to Plan an All-hands Meeting
- ⏱️ 60-second Summary
- What’s an All-hands Meeting?
- Benefits of Having an All-hands Meeting for Your Team
- What Should We Talk About in All-Hands Meetings?
- How to Plan & Conduct Engaging All-Hands Meetings: Step-by-step Process
- Best Practices for Conducting All-Hands Meetings
- All Hands Meeting Tips for Virtual Teams
- How We Plan & Execute All-hands Meetings at ClickUp!
- Plan Better Company-wide Meetings in Less Time With ClickUp
Summarize this article for me please⏱️ 60-second Summary
- All-hands meetings are gatherings that bring all employees together in one place or virtual platform. They help keep everybody informed and engaged, and improve collaboration and transparency
- The agenda for an all-hands meeting can include company updates and announcements, news about key initiatives, employee recognition, customer success stories, and informal Q&As with the leadership
- To plan an engaging all-hands meeting, keep these steps in mind:
- Have a clear objective and agenda
- Prepare a communication plan and decide on the meeting format
- Identify speakers, inclusions, and inputs you will need
- Send out invites and schedule reminders
- Test your tech in advance
- Keep your audience engaged—include quizzes or polls, add visuals, and make the session interactive
- Address questions, share action items and takeaways, and seek feedback
- All-in-one work apps like ClickUp can make planning and executing all-hands meetings feel effortless, with everything from templates and AI assistance to productivity tools to save you time
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat’s an All-hands Meeting?
An all-hands meeting is a virtual or in-person gathering that includes all employees and leaders in your business. From the C-suite to the junior worker bees, this meeting includes just about everyone in your org chart.
All-hands meetings differ from regular team meetings because they include multiple departments and stakeholders. The sheer number of attendees is also a big difference. Instead of a few attendees, you’re managing dozens and dozens of people in a single meeting.
As the meeting planner, you’ll take more of a moderator role to:
- Invite all relevant attendees
- Create the all-hands meeting agenda
- Keep the meeting moving
Your business might hold all-hands meetings on a regular basis, like Google’s town hall meetings, or hold them as needed when something big or exciting happens.
More often than not, businesses use all-hands meetings to build company culture, share exciting news, or unite the entire company. The goal is not to just share information but to get your team pumped. 🏋️
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits of Having an All-hands Meeting for Your Team
Planning an all-hands meeting is no small feat. You’re juggling multiple calendar invites and questions from a lot of attendees. The C-suite will also be there, so you know, no pressure. 👀
Regular all-hands meetings are beneficial for a company because they help align teams, create a culture of transparency, and boost employee engagement. Here’s why having a regular all-hands meeting schedule is valuable:
1. Improves communication in the workplace
All-hands meetings ensure that everyone, from leadership to individual contributors, is on the same page. They provide a platform to share company updates, goals, and major decisions.
For distributed teams especially, these team meetings are a great way to catch up on everything that’s going on across the company.
Regular staff meetings with the entire organization connect people who usually don’t work together. Bringing people together is a good thing, especially when they all have different experiences and talents.
If possible, design all-hands meetings that encourage folks from different departments to interact with each other. You never know where their spontaneous conversations will lead.
2. Enhances transparency and trust
You need to foster team collaboration not just in your department but across the entire business. Open communication is the best way to build trust and encourage your employees to open up more.
Leadership can openly discuss company performance, challenges, and future plans in a company-wide town hall meeting. This helps employees feel informed, reducing uncertainty and speculation.
Also, they give employees a forum to raise concerns, suggest ideas, and get clarity on company matters.
Instead of siloing information in one department or between managers only, all-hands meetings share information with the entire company in a forum that encourages transparency.
3. Strengthens company culture
Regular meetings reinforce core values, mission, and vision. They create a sense of unity, especially in remote or hybrid teams. Collaboration also improves when everyone understands broader company objectives.
All-hands meetings give your team more opportunities to connect with each other outside of their normal work responsibilities. These extra cross-team connections foster a sense of community that’s essential to culture-building. 🌻
Plus, all-hands meetings orient new hires to the way you do things. If you recently hired a handful of junior workers, all-hands meetings are a quick way to bring new folks into your company culture.
4. Improves employee engagement and morale
How often do you see all of your coworkers in one place?
Having everyone together gives you a chance to brag about your employees’ achievements, which works wonders for team morale. When planning all-hands meetings, make it a point to celebrate:
- Work milestones
- Anniversaries
- People who go above and beyond
Employees feel valued when they hear directly from leadership and have the opportunity to ask questions. Leaders can also inspire teams by sharing wins and future opportunities in such informal gatherings.
5. Drives accountability and focus
When employees see how their work contributes to the company’s success, they feel more engaged. The key updates shared in an all-hands meeting help teams stay accountable for goals and progress.
Leaders can also take advantage of a company town hall to highlight priorities and reinforce business strategies to build alignment.
6. Gains project buy-in
All-hands meetings give your team warm, fuzzy feelings, but they have a work-related purpose too. Buy-in is an essential ingredient for project management, so if you’re trying to sell your team (and your boss) on a new initiative, this is the time to earn every team member’s buy-in.
If you’ve decided on a bold new direction, all-hands meetings are the time to share reasons for the change, why it’s a good thing, and what employees should expect going forward.
The goal is to assuage your team’s fears while boosting alignment on your company goals in effective town hall meetings. ✨
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Should We Talk About in All-Hands Meetings?
Do you have the responsibility of planning the next all-hands meeting at your company? Here are key topics you can aim to cover:
- Company updates and performance: Share recent achievements, challenges, and overall progress toward goals
- Vision, mission, and strategy: Reinforce the company’s direction and how each team contributes to success
- Key projects and initiatives: Highlight major projects, product updates, or upcoming launches
- Employee recognition: Celebrate team milestones and outstanding contributions
- Financial and business performance: Provide a high-level overview of revenue, growth, and key metrics
- Culture and values: Reinforce company culture by sharing stories and examples of core values in action
- Q&A session: Allow employees to ask leadership questions and address any concerns
- Customer success stories: Share positive customer feedback or case studies to connect employees with the impact of their work
- Challenges and roadblocks: Discuss major challenges and how the company is addressing them
- Upcoming events and opportunities: Announce company events, training sessions, or career growth opportunities
Not sure what to include in your all-hands meeting agenda? We’ve got you covered. It’s easy to craft an effective agenda with the help of a template.
ClickUp’s Leadership Meeting Agenda template includes sections for:
- Highlighting achievements
- Reviewing metrics
- Setting future milestones
- Staff updates
It even comes with ready-made formatting and eye-catching graphics. That way, you’ll spend less time on document formatting and focus your energy on the meat and potatoes of the meeting.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Plan & Conduct Engaging All-Hands Meetings: Step-by-step Process
All-hands meetings are a magical opportunity for transparency and connection, but attendees will quickly descend into boredom if the meeting isn’t engaging enough. Follow these steps to plan an all-hands meeting that’s equal parts fun and informative. 🤩
For your convenience, we’ve divided the steps into things to do before, during, and after the team meeting.
Before the meeting
1. Define the objective
Clearly outline the purpose of the meeting, whether it’s to share company updates, celebrate achievements, align teams, or address concerns.
Understanding the goal helps shape the agenda and ensures the meeting delivers value to employees. The purpose of the meeting will also help you decide the right format for it.
2. Decide on the meeting format
Remember, this is a different type of meeting. All-hands meetings aren’t the same as one-on-one meetings: there are a lot of people on this call, so you need to make the most of every second.
Before inviting everyone to the call, plan out the meeting in a way that makes information easy to consume. That might mean:
- Starting with icebreakers or fun trivia to set a positive tone at the start of the meeting
- Sharing company-wide updates in a town hall style, which allows your leadership team to share quick updates to get everyone on the same page
- Incorporating “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) sessions with senior leadership and opening the floor to employees
- Conducting Q&As or polls in real-time
If you’re in a hybrid organization, think about how to give remote workers as equitable an experience as possible to better your company culture as an inclusive one. For example, if in-person attendees get fun company swag, ship the swag to remote attendees ahead of time so they aren’t left out.
3. Set a date and time
Choose a time that accommodates employees across different locations and time zones to maximize attendance.
For national or multinational teams, consider time zones before scheduling a meeting. Your employees in China probably don’t want to take a call at 11 p.m., so try to find a time that works for the majority of the company.
Consider rotating meeting times to be inclusive or offering a recorded version for those who can’t attend live.
4. Prepare the communication plan
The whole team will be on this call, so it’s always a good idea to gather input from others before creating an agenda. You might think the team wants to focus on fun things like work anniversaries or shout-outs, but maybe they actually want to have a heart-to-heart with the CEO instead.
Take time to collect questions for Q&A sessions or town hall meetings, create out-of-the-box icebreaker questions, and gather all-hands meeting ideas from your team.
Instead of asking everyone to reply to an email thread with meeting ideas, create a survey and send it to the entire company. For example, you can customize ClickUp’s Employee Feedback Form Template to keep track of ideas.
Not every idea will be a winner, but you’ll definitely find new, interesting ideas by spitballing with other teams—especially when trying to discuss company matters.
5. Design the meeting agenda
As much fun as all-hands meetings can be, they still need structure. Otherwise, you risk veering off-topic and spending precious company time on less important topics. Structure the meeting with a logical flow, covering essential updates, leadership messages, employee engagement, and Q&A.
Keep it balanced—avoiding an overload of information while ensuring all important topics are addressed in a concise and engaging manner.
💡 Pro Tip: ClickUp Docs, powered by AI and connected to tasks and chat, is your perfect tool for creating and executing the meeting agenda.
This is a chance to update everyone on how the company is performing overall, so design a focused, engaging agenda. Depending on your business, a few best practices to follow would be to allocate time for:
- New hire introductions to all team members
- CEO remarks and company updates on key projects
- Short updates from each department and how it fits into the company’s mission
- Employee recognition for a healthy company culture of team appreciation
- Open Q&A for team members to discuss company updates with the C-suite
In your agenda, note how much time you plan to spend on each speaker or topic.
6. Gather content and speakers
Identify who will present each section, ensuring a mix of leadership and team representatives to keep the meeting dynamic. Prepare slides, key talking points, and supporting data to make the presentations clear and impactful.
💡 Pro Tip: Use ClickUp Tasks to convert meeting agendas into actionable tasks with just a click and tag anyone in your organization for easier cross-department collaboration.
7. Send invites and reminders
Agenda in hand, it’s time to invite everyone to your all-hands meeting. Communicate meeting details well in advance through chat, email, or internal calendars, including the agenda and a link to join.
Send friendly reminders a few days before and on the day of the meeting to ensure high attendance.
Scheduling an all-hands meeting is no small feat, though, so if you need help planning the event, use ClickUp’s All Hands Meeting template to speed things up.
Tools like ClickUp enhance the all-hands meeting process from planning to execution.
8. Ensure technical setup
Test the video conferencing platform, microphone, camera, and any presentation tools to avoid last-minute technical issues.
If using interactive features like live polls, chat, or Q&A sessions, ensure they are set up and functional before the meeting starts.
During the all-hands gathering
9. Facilitate the meeting
Start on time, set a positive and engaging tone, and stick to the agenda to respect everyone’s time. Encourage interaction through polls, shoutouts, or live chats, keeping the meeting engaging rather than a one-way presentation.
💡 Pro Tip: Set up automated reminders with ClickUp Reminders to ensure teams join the meeting on time.
10. Address questions and feedback
Dedicate time for an open Q&A where employees can raise concerns or seek clarification. Use anonymous question submissions if necessary to encourage honest feedback and ensure leadership responds transparently.
11. Summarize key takeaways
Recap the most important points, decisions, and next steps at the end of the meeting. Reinforce key messages so employees leave with clarity on company goals, expectations, and their role in upcoming initiatives.
💡 Pro Tip: You can get AI to summarize your all-hands meeting notes in a few seconds. ClickUp Brain is built into ClickUp Docs, so you can quickly turn around takeaways after a meeting.
With AI you can enhance meeting productivity in several ways:
- Create meeting minutes: Instead of scrambling to jot down every word during meetings, let the AI help you. ClickUp AI can help draft clear and structured minutes that capture the essence of the discussion, ensuring nothing important slips through the cracks
- Summarize meeting notes: After a long all hands meeting, you might end up with pages upon pages of notes. ClickUp Brain can condense this information into concise summaries in your Docs, making it easier to review and share the main points
After the meeting
12. Share a recording and other materials
Shortly after the all-hands meeting (no later than 24 hours), send out a short summary email with a meeting recording. This reinforces the points discussed and helps those who couldn’t attend stay in the know.
💡 Pro Tip: Record your meeting presentation with ClickUp Clips to share later.
13. Follow up and gather feedback
Following up is just as important as scheduling the meeting. This closes the loop and holds your team accountable for action items.
After your meeting, you might need to:
- Assign follow-up action items to certain departments or team members
- Check with team leaders to request feedback about the meeting
Collecting feedback through surveys or informal discussions will help you improve the format, content, and overall experience of future all-hands meetings.
💡 Pro Tip: Collect feedback and suggestions and turn them into trackable tasks with ClickUp Forms.
While you’re probably hoping for glowing feedback about your meeting, it’s important to act on constructive criticism. That’s the only way to ensure your future meetings are more engaging and effective. 🏆
Summarize this article for me pleaseBest Practices for Conducting All-Hands Meetings
Be transparent
Transparent communication is key to the success of an all-hands meeting. Employees appreciate honesty and openness from their leaders.
During the meeting, share company updates, news, new initiatives, challenges, and successes. This not only builds trust but also keeps all members informed and actively involved in the business.
Provide feedback
All-hands meetings are an excellent opportunity to provide team-wide feedback. Recognize and applaud achievements, emphasize progress, and positively acknowledge areas in need of improvement.
This helps maintain motivation among employees and promotes a culture of continuous learning and growth.
Hold Q&A’s or fireside chats
Incorporating Q&A sessions or fireside chats into your all-hands meetings is a great way to build engagement.
Your leadership team could answer questions or engage in a casual chat in a relaxed atmosphere. This interactive segment gives employees a unique opportunity to voice their thoughts, clarifications, and opinions.
Provide visuals
Visuals engage the audience and make information easy to digest. Including diagrams, graphs, slideshows, or videos to support your topics enhances clarity and understanding.
A visual representation can explain complex information more swiftly while keeping the audience focused and interested.
💡 Pro Tip: ClickUp Dashboards are the perfect way to visualize team performance, goal achievement, or project progress.
Celebrate successes
Use the meeting as an opportunity to celebrate successes, big or small. Recognizing individual or team achievements boosts morale and motivation.
Encourage participation
Encourage every team member to participate actively in the meeting. The more involved they are, the more engaged they’ll be.
Summarize this article for me pleaseAll Hands Meeting Tips for Virtual Teams
Even though the core principles of all-hands meetings remain unchanged in a virtual setting, running a virtual all-hands meeting does require some adjustments. Here are some quick tips to ensure your all-hands meeting engages your virtual teams effectively:
- Choose the Right Conference Calling Software: Select a reliable virtual meeting platform that supports the size of your team and integrates well with other tools you use. Ensure it has features like screen sharing, breakout rooms, and the ability to record the meeting for those who can’t attend live.
- Pre-meeting Test Runs: Conduct a test run with your IT team to troubleshoot any potential technical glitches. Ensuring audio and visual elements work flawlessly will keep the meeting focused on content rather than technical difficulties.
- Engage Your Audience: Virtual meetings can quickly become passive experiences for attendees. Incorporate interactive elements like polls, Q&A sessions, and small group discussions to keep your team engaged. Consider using engagement tools that integrate with your meeting platform.
- Visuals and Presentations: Use visuals and concise slides to make your points clearer and keep your audience’s attention. A well-designed presentation can significantly enhance the virtual meeting experience.
- Clear Agenda and Time Management: Since virtual meetings can strain attention spans, keep your agenda tight and allow time for breaks, especially if the meeting is lengthy. Share the agenda beforehand to help attendees prepare.
- Encourage Participation: Make it clear that input from all team members is valuable. Encourage questions and comments from the team to foster a two-way dialogue, ensuring everyone feels heard and valued.
- Follow Up: After the meeting, share a summary of the discussion, action items, and the recording with your team. This not only reinforces the content covered but also keeps everyone aligned on next steps, especially those who couldn’t attend the meeting live.
By adapting your approach to fit the virtual format, you can maintain the effectiveness of your all-hands meetings, keeping your team connected, informed, and motivated, no matter where they are.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow We Plan & Execute All-hands Meetings at ClickUp!
In keeping with our culture and values at ClickUp, we have a monthly all-hands meeting to ensure our distributed teams feel supported to do their best work. Of course, we use ClickUp to keep the process efficient.
Here’s how Sarah Gold, Growth Program Manager at ClickUp, describes her process:
😎 Here are some other useful resources for planning meetings, big and small!
Summarize this article for me pleasePlan Better Company-wide Meetings in Less Time With ClickUp
All-hands meetings offer a rare chance for everyone to gather at the same time and place. But the sheer number of attendees makes the planning process seem daunting.
Fortunately, with the right approach, you’ll plan a rockstar all-hands meeting that your team genuinely looks forward to.
Anyone can schedule a meeting, and use a tool to track meeting minutes, but it takes a true pro to plan an outstanding all-hands meeting. Speed up the planning process and leave no stone unturned with the right system.
ClickUp provides all-hands meeting agenda templates, ready-made workflows, tasks, and other tools to simplify your workday.
Better meetings are just a click away. Sign up for ClickUp now—no credit card required!
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