Town Hall Meetings: How to Host Them Effectively (+Template)

While 71% of executives say that employee engagement is critical to success, 85% of employees aren’t actually engaged in their daily work. This needs to change. Whether related to transparency in corporate decision-making, involvement with company goals, or otherwise, it’s important that employees at all levels feel engaged and can interact with the company if they’re likely to stay long-term. Town hall meetings are a great way to get the wider team together.

• What are town hall meetings?
• Why are town hall meetings important?
• What to include in your town hall agenda
• 11 tips for running effective town hall meetings
• Free town hall meeting templates

What are town hall meetings?

Town hall meetings (also called town hall forums or all-hands meetings) are recurring meetings in which an entire organization or department gathers together to share updates, answer questions, and discuss important topics.

They are an opportunity for leaders to present new information on company performance, strategy, and projects and for employees of all levels to contribute to the conversation. Town halls can vary in cadence, usually weekly or monthly. It’s important to schedule town hall meetings at a time that works for everyone, so keep in mind time zones or peak meeting hours.

Why are town hall meetings important?

Town halls are the best way for upper management to connect with employees on other levels, creating more transparency in organizational decisions. Opening up a conversation on big and upcoming topics to the wider team can help lower-level employees feel aware and aligned with company or team goals. Long term, making the whole organization feel included can improve employee retention and overall employee satisfaction. For example, end-of-year town halls can help your employees feel more aligned with high-level strategic company goals for the next year and shift their focus.

By ensuring your town halls are high-value, your organization can experience the following benefits:

• Greater transparency into upper management decision-making
• Improved organizational alignment
• Opportunity for early feedback on new initiatives
• More visibility into other teams and projects within the company

What to include in your town hall meeting agenda

• Introduction
• Company updates
• Achievements and shoutouts
• Q&A

Introduction

A warm introduction sets the tone for the town hall meeting, ensuring it gets off to the right start. Welcome everyone and thank them for their time. This is a great way to break the ice, highlight the purpose of the meeting, and provide a brief overview of the agenda. By creating a welcoming atmosphere, employees can feel valued and engaged immediately.

Company updates

Town hall meetings are effective tools for sharing information with the entire organization in one go. Have leaders run through the agenda and communicate key business results, future goals, or any changes to policies or benefits. Sharing any work updates, discussing areas for improvement, and celebrating successes can help employees understand the organization’s direction and their individual contribution to its overall success.

Achievements and shoutouts

Once the formal company updates are addressed, it’s time to cover any wins in the company. This provides an opportunity for leaders to acknowledge and appreciate the individual achievements of employees. Especially in a remote or hybrid environment, it’s important to carve out time for more human, personal moments. By highlighting employee wins, milestones, and special events, this can reinforce a positive company culture that recognizes and values its employees.

Q&A

Reserve ample time for a Q&A where employees can ask leadership any pertinent questions. This is an essential component of a town hall meeting since it allows employees to engage and interact with leaders in real-time, ask questions, and share their thoughts or concerns. This helps foster transparency and open dialogue. To ensure that all questions are addressed, try to establish a structured process for collecting and answering questions, either during the meeting or async.

For a quick breakdown of how Aydin Mirzaae, CEO of Fellow, conducts his Town Hall Meeting format for improved company culture and alignment, check out the video below:

11 tips for running effective town hall meetings

• Set a recurring meeting cadence 
• Have focused objectives
• Create a collaborative meeting agenda
• Record and transcribe the meetings
• Follow a schedule 
• Have a meeting facilitator
• Share new content 
• Have time for questions
• Gather feedback regularly 
• Stay on time
• Encourage shoutouts 

1 Set a recurring meeting cadence 

Establishing a consistent meeting cadence reassures employees they can access updates within a specified time frame and ensures corporate transparency. Make sure to send a calendar invite on a recurring basis to ensure employees have dedicated time set aside for the town hall meeting in advance. Employees who are aware of the meeting time in advance will be more likely to attend and contribute. With higher attendance rates comes higher engagement.

2 Have focused objectives

Setting clear meeting objectives beforehand ensures that the town hall is effective and helpful. Identify one focus topic or a set of focus topics, depending on relevance and importance, the frequency of your town halls, or the length of time that you’ve set aside for each meeting. Using feedback from prior group meetings, building a collaborative agenda, or leveraging insights from an employee feedback meeting can all be great starting points for identifying a town hall goal.

3 Create a collaborative meeting agenda 

Using a collaborative meeting agenda allows all key stakeholders to contribute collaboratively and for other employees to see the meeting’s topics. For town halls, the collaborative meeting agenda should be created by the executive leadership team or senior leaders from various departments to ensure all key points get addressed.

4 Record and transcribe the meetings

With all the new information presented in a hybrid or virtual town hall meeting, recording and transcribing the meetings is a great way to keep tabs on what actually happened during the event. Doing so can be helpful for those who couldn’t make the meeting or for anyone who wants to refer back to a discussion point or recall important information.

The best way to automate your meeting transcription and management process is with Fellow. Fellow’s AI Meeting Copilot automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings while seamlessly integrating into your meeting workflow and favorite tools. This allows everyone to have an accurate record of the meeting and access details later without any missing context or decisions.

5 Follow a schedule 

Building a meeting schedule ensures that you’ll discuss relevant topics, have time for questions, and stay within the allotted meeting time. Sending the schedule to your attendees at least a day or two in advance gives them some time to prepare thoughts on the topic(s) at hand. Doing so means that they’ll have some ideas for questions and possibly some initial feedback to share during the town hall. 

6 Have a meeting facilitator

Whether it be the CEO or someone else, having one meeting facilitator to keep the meeting on track is crucial. When presenting or discussing topics, it can also be hard to manage time, so your meeting facilitator should be someone other than the main presenters. They will ensure that discussing one topic doesn’t go on for too long so that the other pressing talking points won’t get lost or the meeting won’t end on time.

7 Share new content 

In a growing organization, everyone’s time is valuable. Rather than using the town hall time to reshare updates, add value by sharing new information in the meeting. This helps maintain attendance and engagement rates long-term since employees know they’ll learn something new by attending. This also allows you to hear first reactions and immediate employee feedback, which can be a great asset in identifying any issues early. 

8 Have time for questions

The whole point of a town hall is to interact with your employees and hear their opinions, so it must have an open question period. If you have several focus topics, you may consider asking questions at the end of each topic discussion so that the questions are relevant to the topic at hand. You can also send out a post-meeting survey or question form following the meeting for anyone who thinks of questions later.

9 Gather feedback regularly 

For recurring town hall meetings, asking for feedback or checking in with a diverse selection of employees can help you get constructive feedback for future town halls. To maximize the feedback you receive, establish key success metrics. How are you measuring the success of your town halls? Some key factors can be attendance, engagement, compliance with the schedule, etc. Remember to choose a quantifiable metric that is easy to share with the meeting facilitators for visibility.

10 Stay on time

Town halls are valuable, but they aren’t the center of your employees’ responsibilities. Starting the meeting on time, sticking to the agenda, and finishing within the allotted time frame ensures that you respect your employees’ schedules before and after the meeting. If you think it may run over time, save the remaining discussion points for next time or discuss them asynchronously. Or, use a tool like a meeting parking lot to table unplanned discussion topics, allowing you to keep focus on the issues at hand ands stick to the schedule.

11 Encourage shoutouts 

37% of employees value public recognition in their workplace. What’s a better way to openly recognize great work than by shouting out these successes during the town hall? These shoutouts can go a long way to making an employee feel appreciated and showing other teams that you see the value that individual employees bring to the company. Ahead of the town hall, send out a reminder to any leaders or managers to add any shoutouts for their employees for work well done to the agenda.

Free town hall meeting templates

Stay connected with Fellow

Town halls are an effective way to keep organizations aligned from the top down and bottom up. With the right structure and facilitation, they can build transparency, culture, and connectivity across all levels.

Fellow is here to help elevate your organization’s town halls before, during, and after. With an extensive library of 500+ ready-to-use meeting templates, Fellow can provide clear frameworks for leaders to run more engaging and inclusive town halls. These meeting templates are also completely customizable, allowing you to make them tailor-fit to your organization’s needs.

During the meeting, Fellow’s got you covered with collaborate meeting agendas and accurate AI transcriptions and summaries. Plus, with the help of Fellow’s browser extensions, everyone can access the town hall meeting agenda and notes right inside the call, add last-minute shoutouts or questions, or create action items in real-time. Once the town hall has ended, Fellow’s AI Meeting Copilot will auto-share the AI meeting recap with attendees so everyone has a clear idea of priorities moving forward.

Don’t wait to improve your town hall meetings and boost organizational alignment. Get started with Fellow today!