Town Hall Meetings Get Real

By Brian Anderson, Chief Marketing Officer at POPin

As new tools, analytics and technology transform the traditional workplace, "town-hall-style" gatherings remain popular forums for employees at all levels to engage with one another and have direct contact with senior management.

Beyond the camaraderie, the issues at hand and the need for consensus gathering, transparency, feedback and input make town halls an attractive option. As such, the agenda setting, post-meeting action items and feedback loops can hold as much weight as the meeting. But corporate town hall meetings often fall flat; employees see them as lip service rather than places for their voices to genuinely be heard, and senior management perceives them as precarious attempts at transparency with a low yield on organizational alignment.

This disconnect shows a failure to source feedback from employees prior to meetings so that management can plan to address the right topics. Despite efforts to gather the whole team, it is challenging to prioritize agenda items, figure out what’s really top of mind across the board, and discern how best to address issues with a constructive, results-based approach.

Below are a few tips to drive more actionable insights on important company-wide issues in a town hall setting:

Before the meeting:

Crowdsource questions. By crowdsourcing questions from employees before the town hall starts, companies can set a structured agenda for the meeting. Managers can use these questions to gauge which issues are the most pressing and should be prioritized. By using software to crowdsource questions from employees, management also minimizes the risk of spending the majority of the meeting discussing a topic that isn’t a primary concern for employees.

Enable anonymity. Candid feedback is key to company improvement, and by remaining anonymous, employees can be more honest with their feedback without the fear of retribution. Employees should be allowed to anonymously ask questions and provide feedback to senior management. Crowdsourcing technology makes it easy for employees to submit anonymous comments.

During the meeting:

Encourage dialogue. Real-time questions allow the audience to engage with the presenter during the town hall. However, employees can be intimidated when the CEO asks the audience for questions. To prevent this, companies can use mobile technology to allow employees to anonymously submit questions during the town hall.

Swap the schedule. During most town halls, CEOs and upper management can seemingly dominate the allotted time with presentations and monologues, leaving little time for a Q&A session at the end.

The goal of a town hall is to gain insight and feedback from employees. By limiting the presentation time for executives and scheduling a longer Q&A session, management will have ample time to address employee concerns.

After the meeting:
Leverage analytics. Companies should have an analytics platform in place to quantify how effectively the messages of their town hall meeting was transmitted. Analytics empower managers to bridge identified gaps and build closer relationships with their employees.

Provide insights. In addition to providing a recap of the town hall, managers should provide all employees with insights gained from the meeting. A crowdsourcing platform can help managers use analytics to provide insight in a constructively.


For managers, corporate town halls are a great way to drive transparency within the organization and cultivate meaningful conversations with their employees. Town halls provide employees with an open forum to ask questions and provide feedback, which will ultimately help the company improve. Despite best efforts to hold interactive town halls in which workforce concerns are heard, it’s still difficult to discern exactly what employees need. By leveraging new tools and analytics to facilitate anonymous, organized town halls with employees, managers can ensure that these meetings will provide fruitful results.