Energize Your "Town Hall Meetings"

Communications people need to take a hard look in the mirror and give an honest answer to an important question – Are employees getting weary of the routine drill of management speeches that we’re trying to pass off as a “town hall meeting?” 

If you go back a couple hundred years, you’ll find at least one striking difference between colonial days when town meetings were the real thing and the feeble attempts of companies today trying to duplicate the effect.  When they opened the floor for discussion in the old days, it created true dialogue.  Sure, employees are usually invited to ask questions at company meetings, but few people step up to the microphone to ask anything probing or provocative because they don’t feel comfortable talking in front of a crowd.  It’s just not the same.

Here’s one way to make town hall meetings more energizing and meaningful for employees:

1. Start with the goal to create substantive engagement, understanding that acceptance and behavior change occur more from conversations than presentations.
2. Break everyone into groups of 8-10 people.
3. Pose a question for small groups to discuss for 10-15 minutes, and ask them to come up with a list of responses; if you have multiple topics and limited time, assign different questions to different groups.
4. Ask a spokesperson from each group to give a 90-second report on their top three ideas. 
5. Have the person facilitating the process give a brief response, acknowledging input from each group.
6. If the group is too big for everyone to do a report, select a manageable number, and request that remaining groups submit their answers in writing for later review and response. 

But that’s just the beginning.  What happens next is just as important.  Nothing worth talking about can be sustained from one quarterly meeting to another.  Without a systematic follow-up processes to imbed the conversations deeper, the impact will quickly fade.  So make sure that departments continue discussions on topics from the meeting to ensure they are assessed and addressed throughout the organization on an ongoing basis.  

Les Landes, Landes & Associates

Buy Les’s webinar replay: Getting to the Heart of Employee Engagement