A simple, practical guide for leading a productive town hall meeting

In 1633, Dorchester, Massachusetts, was the home of the nation’s first town hall. According to the town’s court records, residents met every Monday at 8 a.m. to adjudicate disputes and adopt “such orders as may contribute to the generally good as foresaid.” The decisions taken during these sessions were regarded as binding on all men, “without gainsaying or protest,” and were respected as law.

As a successful way for the populace to decide on significant concerns of the day, the practice quickly expanded throughout New England. Residents were able to voice their opinions on local matters through town hall meetings. The informal forum with majority rule formed the basis of early American democracy and continues to be employed across the nation.

Town halls in a business setting often have senior leaders positioned to connect with employees and can be leveraged as an opportunity to share important information and insights. Some companies might refer to these gatherings as “all hands” meetings, and if done well, they can create clarity and answer some of the most pressing concerns employees have, especially when questions are gathered ahead of time.

These meetings are opportunities to connect with employees and take them out of their day, so your town halls should be well organized. It’s best practice to share the meeting focus and resources to capture questions. Some companies choose to partner with their communications department to help facilitate questions to the leaders and to filter questions that were submitted before the meeting or those that come in in real time: “It also is critical for each business function, including finance, HR, sales, and engineering, to provide updates about where they stand and what they are planning.”

To improve the town hall experience, consider keeping the meetings short and making the agenda fresh and non-repetitive in terms of content shared in other similar forums. Although the business might find this to be a great opportunity to reiterate certain messages, it can be frustrating from an employee’s perspective to hear content that has already been shared in another context, making a particular town hall meeting feel redundant.

I have attended town hall meetings that were positioned more like podcast interviews between leaders and some other team member. One of the best opportunities to leverage that kind of setting is when a new leader joins an organization, particularly when there may be some trepidation about the scope of the work that this individual would be leading, or maybe the reputation of the company this person is coming from.

In those particular meetings, there were moments of candor, where a leader had an opportunity to share their vision and their values to create a baseline around what the business or division might expect in terms of the way forward.

There are also moments set aside for Q&As, with questions coming directly from the crowd or from online. When done well, this creates an opportunity for employees in the organization to get an initial glimpse of the leader’s perspective and style of communication, and bridge the gap between answered questions.

In my own career, there have been some missed opportunities to leverage town hall meetings to formally introduce myself to the company and facilitate the space for me to share the vision that I held for the work I was shepherding.

In my view, the barriers to leveraging an all-hands or town hall meeting for me stemmed from what I believe were the organization’s attempts to pause the progression of initiatives and/or control the narratives around some of the changes that were coming and who would be the face of those changes.

Given those dynamics, what I did instead was schedule meetings with senior leaders and stakeholders across the organization to share a high-level vision of the work.

Although the formal alignment of that vision took quite some time, the process of alignment was an indicator of what the business valued at a particular point in time.

This edited extract is from Organizational Culture by Marie Carasco ©2024 and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.