How To Organize A Remote Town Hall

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how to organize a remote town hall meeting

How To Organize A Remote Town Hall Meeting

The beauty of working remotely is you can gather people from around the world in one place. It’s one of my favorite ways for leaders to become visible. Because when you organize a town hall meeting, people can hear and see you in real-time. 

how to organize a virtual town hall meetingYou may want to consider this communications method if you believe there are pressing questions from within your company.  This option will give your team up-to-date information with you present. The fact that people can see and interact with you is also key to them feeling like you are dedicated to keeping everyone informed.

Outlined below are two important steps for organizing your town hall meeting – gathering your teams, and making sure the meeting runs smoothly.

1. Gather Your Teams

In order to put on a town hall meeting, you will have to do a little bit of organization and planning ahead of time.  A town hall meeting is great, but if no one knows about it, or if no one can access the meeting – your efforts will be lost.

  • Marketing Team – Once you’ve decided to move forward with a town hall meeting, you will want to gather the marketing team. The marketing team will help you promote the event to the entire organization. 
  • IT Team – The IT team is important for your town hall meeting because you will want someone there who is able to support the technical aspects of the event. You will also want to build in time to do test runs as well. 
  • Managers – You will want to gather any integral managers or leaders who you feel may add huge value to the event. This could be the operations lead, general counsel, or any other critical managers who you think others may want to hear from.  These people could also be those who you believe need to be visible as well. 

Once you’ve gathered your team, you will want to make sure everyone is aligned on messaging and what they will all be covering.  

It is important that you create an agenda and send it out to all of the teams listed above.  

 

2. Make Sure Things Run Smoothly

On the day of the town hall meeting, you will want to make sure everything runs smoothly. 

There are several things to consider to ensure this happens:

  • Speakers – You will want to give each manager or leader a chance to talk and share their own department updates.  You will want to cap the time they have to no more than 10 minutes per person. remote town hall meeting
  • Discussion – As the meeting progresses, you’ll want to continuously encourage people to engage.  This means telling the viewers to submit their questions in the chat function. As people engage, make sure you have someone assigned on the backend to monitor and consolidate all of the questions. 
  • Q+A – You will want to set aside time for all of the managers to answer questions that have come in. It’s best to have all of the leaders speak first, and then open it up for Q+A. 
  • Event Moderator – Whether it is you or someone you’ve assigned, have a person be an event moderator or host.  This is key in ensuring the flow of the event is smooth and topics stay on track. The event moderator will also be the one to read the questions and control the room function, such as muting people and spotlighting speakers. 
  • End The Meeting – As the meeting ends, be sure to end the meeting with a clear follow-up so everyone attending knows when they can expect another town hall meeting.  Whether this is weekly, biweekly, monthly or quarterly.

The beauty of remote town hall meetings is you can have many people together to hear from their leaders in real-time. Ensure that it will be a smooth event by inviting other leaders to speak as well.  Set the expectations with the attendees by sending out an agenda and making sure everyone knows what to do during the day of the event.

Having everyone come together will give the feeling that the organization is together despite everyone working remotely. 

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