Communication is the center of the business growth. Having healthy communications and time to engage with employees and stakeholders to share ideas and find solutions to grow the business is essential.
One best ways to have this communication in a company environment is to have town hall meetings. This article gives some insights into the ideas you can include in your next town hall meeting to make it more interactive and engaging.
What’s a Town Hall Meeting
This is an interactive meeting with employees to give productive feedback about the business growth and share ideas on the future plans of the business.
Through these meetings, business stakeholders and employees get to hear the business’s challenges, give insights on the best way to grow the business’s sales and revenue and discuss other important topics about the business growth and employees welfare.
Through the meetings, a brand strengthens the business relationship, brings employees closer, and strengthens the company culture. It’s the best way for employees to have a direct interaction with their senior leaders and get to know them better.
Best interactive ideas for your next Town hall meeting
If you’re planning your next Town hall meeting and want to make it engaging and interactive here are some ideas you can include for the virtual meeting.
Have a clear agenda for your Meeting
Every town hall meeting has an objective to achieve for the business. Give your members agendas before the day of the meeting to have a rough idea of what they plan to discuss and what the meeting is all about.
When picking up the agendas, choose topics that can engage members during the meeting. It’s also essential to give a rough estimate of the time it will take to discuss a given topic during the meeting.
Create the agenda collaboratively and have the other team members and employees have their say on the agenda topics. It helps ensure you come up with topics that people are more involved in and will increase employee engagement during the meeting.
Share company updates
Your employees need to know how the company they’re working for is going on. Through the town hall meeting, the employees and stakeholders need to know how the business projects are going. The leaders can share the advancements of the projects and milestones the business has achieved within the period of the year they have covered.
If the business is in the second quarter of the year, they can share the projects achieved in the first quarter of the year and the plans they have to work on in the second quarter. Here are some updates the people can know:
- New company employees
- The number of new onboarded clients
- The current challenges facing the business
- Financial updates of the company
Open opportunity for asking questions
Your employees will have their own questions they need addressed during the meeting. To make the session interactive, open the flow to the people who have questions and engage with them and answer the questions.
Since the employees don’t always have the opportunity to interact with executives of the company, that opportunity will give them the time to share what’s on their minds and get their voices heard.
Give members enough time to contribute to discussions
Don’t make the meeting all about a certain group of the company. To engage members more, ensure they have enough time to give their thoughts and feedback on the different agendas of the meeting. For instance, you can use wearable app development smartwatches to manage time, ensure each agenda is timely, and streamline communication during the meeting.
You can give a thought-provoking idea and pair members to discuss it more deeply and finally bring all the suggestions to the table. Having such plans helps employees feel they are part of the business and that their contributions and ideas are appreciated by their teammates and company leaders
Give a shout-out to those who’ve done extraordinary work
Every company has those unique people who go out of their way to do amazing work for the company. During a meeting like this, you can give a shout-out to those special people and appreciate their input in the company’s growth.
You can go ahead and share personal news with your teammates during the meeting. For example, if you’re expecting a child, that’s great news and your teammates can celebrate that with you. Other personal news are like wedding announcements, graduating of your kids, etc.
Comments and FAQs session
This is a meeting where employees and stakeholders get an opportunity to speak their minds, share their challenges, and give ideas that can be useful in the running of the business. Apart from the topics to be discussed in the meeting, having a more open schedule to address any other issues the team leaders or the employees have about the business is essential.
Give the team enough interactive time to share their thoughts, and give recommendations and feedback about how the business is doing and what can work better for the business.
It’s important for the moderator of the meeting to ensure that they control the engagement at this level as different people can use the chance to raise personal issues that can take a long time and not be productive for the meeting and the business progress at large.
The feedback from the members in the meeting is helpful to ensure that future town hall meetings are better and achieve more for the business progress.
Have a warm welcome with an icebreaker
You don’t want the meeting to start with a boring tone. As the moderator of the meeting, start it with a warm welcome and top it up with an icebreaker to warm up the meeting as it starts. Give them some time to chat with the person next to them. Use an interactive question as your welcome icebreaker for the meeting.
Record your town hall meeting
Sometimes the company will have virtual town hall meetings when the employees are from different locations. It’s essential to ensure your virtual communication tools are of high quality. Use the best tools to ensure the meeting runs smoothly.
You can also record the meeting so that employees and other team members can review the questions, and get insights about the meeting even if they were not present during the meeting.
Conclusion
If you’re planning to have a virtual meeting with your business partners and employees, you can use Cincopa interactive communication tools to make your event great and streamline your communication and idea exchange with other team members for your brand growth. 
