Engage Your Team with Creative Ideas for Your All Hands Meetings
Guide
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. Every department, office, or store must work together towards a set of common underlying goals.
How can you help your team understand your organization’s goals better? How can you motivate them in their daily tasks? How can you create a stronger sense of teamwork and shared purpose?
All hands meetings bring together your entire workforce. This means that everyone in the company is familiar with the leaders and receives consistent information and guidance. This includes employees in marketing, HR, the office, and the front store. There are numerous documented benefits to offsite meetings for your business, why not put those to work for you with a fun name to get people excited for your town hall?
Let’s explore some fun ideas and creative names to make your all hands meetings more effective and enjoyable.
Start with a Great Location
One way to start your meeting right is to secure a great location. Businesses often have multiple locations or employees who work remotely. A central meeting spot can motivate and excite these individuals. It is a common practice in such situations.
For those with a more centralize location, finding alternative conference venues from the traditional conference rooms can inspire and improve attendance. From hidden gems to unique spaces, changing the traditional venue can spark creative thinking.
Build Your Meeting Around Exciting Guest Speakers
To make your all hands meeting more interesting, try mixing team-building activities with TED-like talks given by guest speakers. The speakers can discuss topics that are important and innovative in your industry.
When the topic is interesting and the expert is credible, your employees are more likely to attend the event. They will also be more emotionally involved in the event.
Your guest could be an industry expert who shares the latest updates and potential developments. They could even be a psychologist who discusses ways to improve teamwork.
See more in our article about how to find speakers for an event.
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
All hands meetings agenda ideas are a vital part of the planning process. Organizing meetings in a very structured and logical way is not always the best way to motivate participants.
Sure you need a good overall meeting agenda, but it should also include entertaining ways to reinforce your goals. To solve this issue, try adding games or contests and presenting certain topics in a fun and engaging manner. All hands meetings, fun activities, and team building are the perfect trio.
Rather than coldly share company sales and profit stats, you can run a guessing game to test the knowledge of various staff members. The game may include questions about the company’s goals, 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. This can help answer the age-old question of “how to make all hands meetings fun”.
The meeting can also include social and connection games for team members to get to know more about each other’s position and responsibilities in the organization. After all, “team meeting” is another word for all hands meetings! Team connection, in these settings, is important. This will give employees from different departments a broader knowledge and understanding of their organization.
One way to promote team building is through contests. These contests involve teams working on quick projects. Projects can include designing a logo, creating a motto, or developing a short advertisement for the company.
Team building activities like contests, minute-to-win-challenges, and trivia rounds are great all hands meeting games. Consider hosting them in one of your breakout rooms to maximize your event space.
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. Reward individuals or groups who have excelled in their work and given a remarkable contribution to the organization. Using celebration as an all hands meeting activity gives your team a sense of appreciation.
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 company wide 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.
Technological Ideas for Virtual All Hands Meetings
Whether you are engaging remote teams in a virtual meeting or a global team in person, technology is vital. Technology can help take your all hands meeting to new heights.
While we have an entire article on virtual meetings, we’d like to highlight some of our top ideas. Consider adding an on-demand option to your live team meeting to work around time zones. This also means your team can review the meeting time and time again. With the on-demand option, your team can watch the replay of the meeting at a convenient time to fully understand the message.
Another great technological feature is live polls to collect questions and answers or boost team engagement. Answering questions in real time engaging teams even in the virtual space. You can use chat features for this as well as sending action items to your team.
Consider gamifying your internal communications leading up to the meeting. Email games (or even scavenger hunts), digital networking, and voting on awards makes engagement high. It also guarantees a high level of excitement for your meeting.
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? Creative names for all hands meetings are important in making the right 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. This is a great way to give your all hands meeting themes surrounding it, like a focus on fun. 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.” Include the event name and goals or motto in decor like word clouds and signage to fully brand your event.
If you need help making up a list of all hands meeting ideas, try reaching out to our corporate event production company 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!
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