Engage Your Team with Creative Ideas for Your 2022 All Hands Meetings
Are you looking for all-hands meeting ideas that will make your next event engaging, effective, and fun? A business, no matter how large or diversified, is like a living organism in which every department, office, or store must work together towards a set of common underlying goals.
What if you could engage your team in a way that promotes a common understanding of your organization’s priorities while also motivating them in their daily work and creating a stronger sense of shared mission?
All hands meetings bring together your entire workforce. This means everybody, from marketing to human resources, from your office to your front store, gets acquainted with the organization’s leadership and receives the same, consistent information and direction.
Let’s explore some fun ideas and creative names to make your all hands meetings more effective and enjoyable.
Build Your Meeting Around Exciting Guest Speakers
One way to create interest and engagement is to structure your all hands meeting as a mix of a team-building opportunity and a TED-like event, where guest speakers are invited to talk about issues and innovation trends related to your company or field.
The more engaging the topic and the more reputable the expert, the higher the chances your workforce will show up and emotionally invest in the event.
Your guest can be a famous connoisseur of industry and fill your team in with the most recent updates and potential developments, or an authoritative psychologist who’ll discuss how to improve group work dynamics.
Other effective guest speakers include company founders, motivational leaders, influencers, and famous writers. You can also include a Q&A session and allow your team to interact directly with your guests, as well as ask the speaker the most frequent questions you collected before the event.
In addition to creating common interest around a relevant topic, such speaking events can also give your workforce new and useful perspectives that will improve their performance in their day-to-day operations.
Engage Your Team with Clever Games and Motivating Contests
Organizing meetings in a very structured and logical way is not always the best way to motivate participants. Sure you need a good meeting agenda, but it should also include entertaining ways to reinforce your goals. One way to overcome this problem is by including games or contests and dealing with certain topics in a more entertaining way.
Rather than coldly listing the company’s latest results in terms of sales or profits, you can run a guessing game to test the knowledge of various staff members. The game may include questions about the company’s mission, values, and social involvement. Things learned while playing are more likely to stick than things learned by passively listening to somebody. We call this “gamification” in the events industry – try taking this angle while brainstorming your all hands meeting ideas.
The meeting can also include social and connection games for team members to get to know more about each other’s position and responsibility in the organization. This will give employees from different departments a broader knowledge and understanding of their organization.
Another way to incentive team building is to create contests in which different groups of team members are tasked with a short project, like coming up with a logo, motto, or short advertisement idea for the company.
You can then organize a fun ceremony to reward the most interesting ideas.
Give Shout-Outs and Prizes for Accomplishments
This is another great way to add some fun to your list of all hands meeting ideas while rewarding individuals or groups who have excelled in their work and given a remarkable contribution to the organization.
Shout-outs can be short and quickly mention the employees while inviting the rest of the audience to give them much-deserved applause. Or they can be an opportunity to invite staff members on stage and have them share their experience with the rest of the workforce.
You can also use the meeting as an opportunity to reward some of your best employees. This may come in the form of physical gifts, like a smartphone or laptop, and in the forms of leisure activities, like a ticket for the local SPA or even a two-night hotel stay at a resort location.
Such events can be very motivating for the rest of the workforce, since social recognition is one of the things we seek the most as human beings. It also gives your staff an idea of which co-workers they should use as inspiration in their daily work.
Promote Transparent and Stress-Free Interactions with Top Managers
All hands meetings are a great opportunity to break the usual boss-employee dynamic and allow the staff to interact naturally with top management executives.
A great way to do so is a Q&A session in which staff members are allowed to ask the managers anything they want.
Questions about the management’s relations with investors or which criteria they use when deciding on promotions are things employees wouldn’t normally ask their boss but knowing these aspects can help them understand how the company works and how they can improve their performance at work.
Also, allowing a more human and empathic interaction between top management and staff members at other levels can strengthen the image and feel of the organization as one big family working together towards a common end.
Brand Your Meeting with Original and Appealing Names
Giving your meeting a great-sounding and captivating name is an integral part of event marketing and can play a major role in making your meeting a success or a failure.
Think of an event’s name as the first impression a person gives you. Would you go to a party if the person who invited you gave you a bad first impression?
The name should give a clear idea of what the meeting is about, it should be very easy to remember, and it should excite the potential attendees. The best creative all hands meeting names reflect the unique qualities of your employees. AltaMed choose “The Power of Us” to reflect the capability of their team when they work to achieve together (see this conference recap).
If your meeting revolves around a guest speaker, make sure you include the name of the star while motivating the audience at the same time. A meeting hosting a renowned company founder could be named “The vision behind the success: Steven Smith and founding Brand X.” If the main guest is an expert in psychology or sociology, the name should connect to daily problems that members of your staff are trying to solve, like “Kate Adams on the 5 secrets to defeat stress-related work.”
Events revolving around games, contests, or prizes should have a cheerful and exciting vibe to them. For example, you can take inspiration from the popular television game show can name your contest “Who wants to be the company’s ambassador of the year?”
You can also play with associations to entertainment media or famous table games, like naming a contest “Game of the Department’s Thrones” or “Marketing Monopoly.”
If you need help making up a list of all hands meeting ideas, try reaching out to professionals that have experience in planning and producing effective, engaging events. We will be happy to share some past events with you and help you make your next event extraordinary!
2019