7 Features to Upgrade Your Virtual Town Halls

Are your employees bored with your virtual town halls? Read on to see how you can spice things up at these vital internal meetings. 

What Is A Virtual Town Hall?

When it comes to getting everybody in your organization together at the same time, the goal is to inform them of your company’s latest developments, missed opportunities, big wins, and other big-picture updates, right? This also helps in strengthening your company’s culture, especially among those distributed teams that may not have significant opportunities to connect with each other or the company in person. That’s where you might have heard the phrase, all-hands meeting or town halls. 

In the current pandemic situation, it is nearly impossible to get all of your staff members together under one physical roof. Now, this is another situation where you might have heard about a virtual town hall. This is due to the fact that more companies see value in hosting virtual town hall meetings. Your employees get a number of benefits with the help of a virtual town hall as compared to an in-person event, including:

  • Easy access to your global employees
  • Information sharing beyond a flat webinar 
  • Opportunities for employee networking and engagement
  • Attendance data to understand how your meetings performed

Of course, shifting from a physical meeting to a virtual event can be a little challenging for many. For instance, a wide variety of people tend to zone out in such big meetings. If you’re also one of those who are organizing a town hall—or perhaps even just presenting in it—you might be thinking about how to make it more engaging for the employees, right? Continue reading to find the exact solution you are looking for. 

The virtual town hall events have a wide range of purposes. The list includes all-hands corporate meetings, appearances from high-profile guest speakers, or addressing a student population that is spread out across multiple locations. 

Benefits of Virtual Town Hall Meetings

Virtual town hall meetings are packed with benefits for companies along with their stakeholders. The fact existed even long before we faced the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are the reasons why:

  • Virtual town halls are one of the best ways to bring large organizations together without any expense (in time and money) relevant to long-distance travel. This travel reduction is definitely better for the environment apart from being less disruptive to employees and their work/life. 
  • Virtual town hall meetings are also best known for providing a format that is meant to recognize top performers. This ensures everyone is on the same page when it comes to new initiatives, along with giving employees access to C-suite executives. 
  • Virtual town halls are one of the ideal ways to display, enhance, and spread your corporate culture as well as reinforcing your collective. 
  • Governments can connect with the community and constituents easily with the help of virtual town halls. On the other hand, universities can bring the student body and faculty together for a variety of occasions such as the first day of term, founder’s celebrations, community announcements, graduation, and much more.

7 Features To Upgrade Your Virtual Town Hall

Here are 5 amazing features that will level up your virtual town hall experience in no time. 

1. Virtual Event Platform

Are you still hosting your town halls through webinar platforms? Use a virtual events platform to create a better, more holistic experience for your employees. You need to look for a virtual event platform that is capable of accommodating a large number of users along with providing smooth, high-quality video on desktop as well as mobile devices. 

In an era where working at home and on the go is a new norm, people are willing to connect to your event in a variety of different ways. It is your job to ensure that everyone enjoys a great memorable experience in terms of video, connectivity, and audio. 

Virtual Auditorium

2. Virtual Chatrooms 

Virtual meeting systems are known for providing an array of tools that are meant to make virtual meetings much more engaging. It is important that you get familiar with your virtual meeting program’s tools. One of the most important options is chat. The chat tool enables employees to ask questions, share ideas, and make comments. 

Virtual chatrooms help make virtual town halls better for organizers/employees in many ways such as exchanging questions, getting quick answers, letting the team know about any technical issues relevant to the event (at the right time), and the list goes on. 

3. Polling

Polling is the second-best option when it comes to allowing the presenters to survey participants better. The live poll is always a good option to keep people’s interest. It is a fast efficient survey tool that employees can use to vote or provide feedback. This will make your next virtual town hall event even better.

4. Whiteboards

If you wish to involve employees in brainstorming ideas, or share information with the help of a visual cue, a virtual whiteboard is all you need. As you’re speaking, you can draw or write your main points on the virtual whiteboard, and employees can view it in real time. It’s estimated that 65% of all people are visual learners, so a whiteboard will undoubtedly increase employees’ retention of your presentation.

5. Live, Semi-Live, and Pre-Recorded Webinars

In order to make the virtual town hall meeting accessible for everyone in the organization, record it. As not everyone is able to make it to these meetings, a recorded live webinar will take care of that. This can be accessed afterward from within the event. Along with the recording, you can also send the meeting minutes in order to share a glimpse of what kind of discussions took place during the virtual session.

6. Post-Event Feedback Survey

Also, don’t forget to ask for post-meeting feedback in a poll. Doing so will make you learn what employees feel about the virtual town hall experience and the topics you selected. You can ask a question that will confirm their understanding of the discussed topic or even some general feedback. 

Asking these 3 simple questions can have a great impact in the future; What did you enjoy the most? Is there anything you dislike? What can make the meeting even better?

7. Q&A Section

Of course, not everyone is able to speak during the meeting, but that doesn’t mean at all that they are not allowed to contribute to the online session. For instance, you can create a channel exclusively for Q&As regarding virtual town hall meetings.

In case you aren’t using any consolidated virtual meeting platform, a specific talk space or group can centralize all the discussions related to the town hall. Attendees can easily share key takeaways, ask questions, etc. Once you get all the questions, the admin can then choose which questions to publish answers to. 

Conclusion

When it comes to a virtual town hall meeting, there’s a lot more than simply sharing business and people updates. For the sake of building your company’s culture, your all-company meetings can play an integral part. You can use these virtual town hall meetings to get your team perfectly working around company goals, openly communicate with the organization, celebrate their wins, and much more. 

It may seem a bit tricky to get everyone online at once, but when you focus on engaging your employees from start to finish, this greatly helps in making sure that your next virtual town hall is going to be as exciting and informative as possible. 

Another important point is, virtual town halls must be free of obstacles along with being effortless for employees to join. Ideally, an employee should only need to click a button in order to join the conversation, and it all starts with having the best online technology that’s agile and reliable.

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