Town Hall meetings are a great tool for company leaders to meet and connect with their employees. Most often, Town Hall meetings are hosted by a member of senior management, either the CEO or a country/regional manager, and are attended by all employees.

What is a Town Hall meeting?

Town hall meetings usually occur on a weekly or monthly frequency, and can happen in-person or virtually. 

At Fellow, Aydin Mirzaee (CEO) hosts Town Hall meetings with our entire team weekly to discuss all the different things that people need to stay informed about within the company, such as organizational goals, recent wins, and cross functional projects and initiatives. 

Beyond being useful for company-wide alignment, Aydin also points out the importance of having high energy town hall meetings that employees look forward to, and walk away from feeling informed and excited about the work they’re doing and goals they’re working towards. 

To help your team incorporate Town Hall meetings into your monthly schedule, we’re sharing Aydin Mirzaee’s template for engaging and effective town hall meetings. 

What’s inside this Town Hall meeting template:

1🎉 Celebrations and Good News

To ensure high energy right from the start of each meeting that will continue to flow through the rest, the CEO always starts Town Halls by sharing good or celebratory news.

The good news shared during this time can be anything from introducing a new team member, sharing positive customer feedback, celebrating a milestone, or launching a new product, project or initiative. 

2📣 Announcements & FYI

Once the energy is up, the CEO moves on to the announcements and information portion of Fellow’s Town Hall meetings. During this time, team members share any news or announcements that affect all, or most, employees, such as product or feature changes, upcoming projects or initiatives, and recent insights or trends.

The announcements made at the phase of the meeting are brief and intended to give a general heads up to all team members. 

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3🎤 Presentations

Next up on the Town Hall meeting agenda is time for teams to showcase their work with a presentation. Not only does this give due recognition to the presenting team members by highlighting the importance of their work, it also helps to educate and inform everyone in the company of various team’s projects and initiatives, and facilitate company-wide support.

Presentations during Fellow’s Town Hall meetings include anything from upcoming marketing campaigns to new feature sneak peeks.

4 🚀 Shoutouts

Following the presentations, the Fellow team takes a few minutes of their Town Hall meeting to recognize their teammates and show their gratitude.

To organize shoutouts, everyone who’d like to give a shoutout puts their name in the meeting agenda, as their name is called they shoutout the team member they’d like to recognize and their efforts or accomplishments.

Not only are shoutouts a great way of keeping the energy and spirits of your town hall meetings high, they’re also another useful way of surfacing and sharing things happening within the company with all team members. 

“The first time that you get a shout out from someone it really makes you feel appreciated, and that the work that you do is valued and seen.”

– Aydin Mirzaee

5 🤔 Q & A 

To tie up any loose ends, our CEO always ends Fellow’s Town Hall meetings with an opportunity to ask and answer any questions team members may have.

As the Town Hall progresses, the team collectively adds any questions that they have to the Q&A portion of the town hall meeting agenda, to be addressed at the end of the meeting.

This not only creates a designated time to address questions to keep your town hall meeting on track, it also ensures no questions fall through the cracks during the course of the meeting. 

Town Hall meetings are important for team alignment and morale, following this Town Hall meeting agenda will ensure your team has an opportunity to share important information, give and receive recognition, and celebrate wins.

Best practices to run effective Town Hall meetings

Because of their importance, Aydin recommends scheduling your town hall meetings during working hours, rather than over lunch, and finding a time that works for the majority of your team to attend. 

Finally, to ensure Town Hall meetings address everything happening within your company, Aydin also recommends that you share your meeting agenda with other managers and employees to add their own celebrations and good news, announcements and FYIs, presentations and of course, shoutouts before the town hall meeting.