Town hall meetings are an essential part of maintaining transparency within a company. Whether you’re hosting your meeting online or in-person, you need to keep participants engaged and ensure that you’re inviting their feedback. In short, you need to make the meeting interesting. This is especially true in a virtual environment where every attendee is in a remote setting. Planning an exciting town hall is certainly a challenge, and it’ll be even more difficult with the constraints of online interaction. Despite this, you can invest in unique details like a Google Meet virtual background to add visual interest to the meeting and create a conversation piece.
Assemble a Diverse Planning Committee
Staging your town hall meeting in front of a Zoom virtual office is a great way to get your team’s attention, but you’ll need to do a little more than that if you want to keep it. Attendees are more likely to be engaged if they have input into the event itself, so it’s a good idea to assemble a diverse planning committee. Perhaps your team has a few usual suspects that typically take over planning duties. You can certainly include these people in planning, but your meeting will benefit if you reach out to new candidates, invite their input, and involve everybody in the planning process.
You should start by considering every aspect of diversity, including racial identity, sexual orientation, and gender. Ideally, you’ll be able to construct a team that represents a wide range of people. Of course, demographic diversity isn’t the only factor. You also want to seek out team members with diverse skill sets and ideas. To accomplish this, talk to every team member and see who’s interested in joining the planning committee — then ask them why.
Provide Opportunities To Interact
If engagement is the ultimate goal, there’s no better tool than talking. People want to interact and communicate — especially in the conversation-starved world of virtual work. To make your town hall meeting interesting, then, you should provide attendees with ample opportunities to interact. You can start off the meeting by inviting anybody to share news or ask a question, and this invitation should remain open throughout the duration of the meeting. As the presentations begin, every key point should correlate to an interaction opportunity, and you can utilize the breakout room feature in your chosen video call software to allow participants to talk.
Unsurprisingly, attendees are far more engaged when they can talk to each other and discuss big ideas. Nobody wants to be a captive audience. You can ensure that your meeting is interesting by regularly soliciting feedback from participants and turning it into an interactive event. More importantly, though, this demonstrates to staff that you value their voice. Everybody wants to feel heard and understood, and implementing an open forum format can establish this kind of connection. You can use Zoom Immersive View backgrounds in these discussions, too, to further reinforce the company brand and maintain a visual appeal that engages viewers.
