Town Hall
meetings have become a calendar fixture at many large companies. Although originally
based on the idea of New England citizens voicing their thoughts, the term Town
Hall is often just another name for traditional, top-down presentations by senior
management.
So how can you
make your town hall event work better? Here are five ways to get it right.
As presentation
experts, we always recommend people to remember A.I.M.
1.
The
A in AIM is to know your audience. A big mistake we see is when senior
management address employees as if they were investors or customers. These are
very different groups that need talking to in different ways. To get it right speak
to the condition, interests and concerns of your employees.
2.
What
is your Intention? What do you want to get out of the event? Is it a rag-bag
collection of parish notices, or is there something specific you want to
achieve, for example to launch a new sale drive. If that’s the purpose of the
meeting, make sure that your audience knows it and you theme the entire event
around it.
3.
Next,
you need to decide on your Message (the M in AIM) and make sure that it is the
“red thread” running through everything that you say. Be ruthless and get rid
of anything from your speech that obscures that message.
Don’t forget
that acronym: AIM. Two other recommendations:
4.
Remember
that you are there to talk to your colleagues, not to deliver a presentation.
Use slides - if you must have them - as visual aids to reinforce your key points.
But cut down the words on the screen. If your audience is reading your slides
they aren’t listening to you. Perhaps using an image could sum up what you want
to say better.
5.
And
if you want to get into a dialogue with employees, create an environment for
doing that. Any audience in the hundreds doesn’t normally ask many questions.
An audience of 20 just might. Would you be better off organising a programme of
internal focus groups – or break the session into smaller tables with an
interactive element.
Finally, don’t
think about Town Hall meetings only as physical events: you can run them just
as effectively through virtual means by putting the same principles into practice.
In any context, a Town Hall can be a powerful mechanism as part of your wider
plans for engaging and equipping employees to play their part in your business.
Paul Farrow
Partner, Benjamin Ball Associates Ltd
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