All Hands Meetings can be energizing events that solidify common understanding among employees, stockholders, analysts and investors. The simultaneous delivery of information to meeting attendees is a unique and important attribute of the structure of an All Hands Meeting.
The three most common All Hands Meeting series types are:
All Hands Meeting Series Types
Regular Employee Communications Meetings
The concept of "All Hands" is closely associated with employees. Employees need to understand business priorities, changes, objectives and direction. Communicating this from business leaders to all employees, especially within a large or global organization, can be slow and ineffective. The All Hands Meeting addresses the need to communicate effectively with the same message across an entire employee base.
Organizations find value in regular employee communications meetings to disseminate information. But, when a regular employee meeting is transformed into an All Hands Meeting, the time sensitivity value of the information conveyed is critical.
In an All Hands meeting, employees all receive the identical message simultaneously. To ensure simultaneous communication, commonly, an internal organization website posts the key All Hands Meeting information as the meeting is being held. Similarly, a company-wide email, text or tweet may be sent to solidify the simultaneous nature of the information's delivery.
Regular employee All Hands Meetings transform standard business communication to "Important Business Communication." The All Hands Meeting format makes this possible and a regular series of meetings creates a business cadence employees can count on.
Organizational Announcements
Periodically, businesses, foundations and public agencies cross certain milestones that are in some way transformative. At these inflection points, employees may need to work or behave differently. Announcement oriented All Hands Meetings can be an essential tool in creating a common understanding among employees and stakeholders that change has come and new actions are required.
An organizational announcement, when delivered via an All Hands Meeting takes on a larger significance and creates a call to action. Leaders of these meetings find that emphasizing the announcement is being disclosed simultaneously increases the significance of the announcement or call to action that is being advocated.
The simultaneous delivery of information that an All Hands Meeting provides, ensures that employee and stakeholder actions are synchronized across an entire organization. While announcement oriented All Hands Meetings may be infrequent, their impact is lasting.
Earnings Calls
Publicly traded corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to disclose information that may be material to their organization in a way that does not favor one group of investors over another. This requires simultaneously delivery of information to all investors and potential investors. Sometimes referred to as Reg FD (Full Disclosure) this is an extraordinary requirement that demands the level of meeting planning associated with an All Hands Meeting.
Planning for information release via an All Hands Meeting format ensures broad and simultaneous delivery of information to a widely disbursed audience. Earnings calls are a common meeting type in which an All Hands Meeting structure is used. Earnings calls are often disclosed via telephone conference call, and simultaneously webcast, tweeted, Facebooked and posted online on a company website.
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