All-Hands Meeting
Opening context, wins, metrics, one strategic topic, Q&A, and the one thing to remember. Built for recorded, async-friendly all-hands.
Free, no sign-up. Editable, copy as Markdown, plain text, or calendar.
Pick a duration
Before the meeting
- Collect questions 48 hours ahead so the team has time to write them without social cost
- Anonymise questions if your company has a trust-building problem
- Confirm the recording and caption setup before the meeting starts
After the meeting
- Publish the recording and the slide deck within 24 hours
- Post a written summary covering the 'one thing to remember' in the company channel
- Answer any questions that didn't get live airtime in writing
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About the all-hands agenda
An all-hands meeting is one of the most expensive meetings your company runs. Fifty people for an hour is fifty hours of payroll, every time you run it. The structure below assumes people will watch the recording async, treats the Q&A as the most important block (even though most companies treat it as an afterthought), and ends with a single message to remember, because without one the meeting will blur into every other all-hands the team has ever attended.
What should be in an all-hands agenda?
Wins and progress, a small set of key metrics, one strategic deep-dive, a spotlight segment, and Q&A. The mistake most all-hands make is to pack in three strategic topics and no real Q&A. Depth on one topic beats breadth on three, because people can only remember one or two things from any given meeting anyway.
How long should an all-hands meeting be?
Sixty minutes is the right default for most companies. Ninety if you are a high-context, fast-changing org. Thirty minutes can work for a very small company (under thirty people) but usually those teams are better off folding the all-hands into a weekly team meeting rather than running a separate ritual.
How do you get good questions in the Q&A?
Collect them in writing, 48 hours ahead, in a shared doc or tool like Slido. Live-only Q&A rewards confidence over substance, and leaves out people in different timezones or those who don't want to speak in front of the whole company. Live questions happen too, but written questions should be the default, not the exception.
Should all-hands be recorded?
Yes, almost always. Recording is what makes an all-hands work for timezone-distributed teams and for anyone who couldn't attend live. It also makes the leaders more thoughtful about what they say, which is not a bad side effect. If leadership is nervous about being recorded, that's a culture problem the recording will surface, not a recording problem.
Frequently asked
- How long should an all-hands meeting be?
- Sixty minutes is the right default for most companies. Thirty minutes is fine for very small teams; ninety minutes can work if the topic genuinely warrants it. Over ninety minutes, attention drops off fast and the recording gets abandoned by async viewers.
- What should be on an all-hands meeting agenda?
- Wins and progress, key business metrics, one strategic deep-dive, a spotlight segment on a team or customer, and a real Q&A section. The mistake most all-hands make is packing in multiple strategic topics and leaving no time for Q&A; that produces meetings people forget by the next morning.
- How often should you run an all-hands?
- Monthly is the most common cadence. Quarterly works for companies where the pace of change is slower. Weekly is almost always too frequent: there isn't enough real news each week to justify interrupting the whole company.
- How do you make Q&A work in an all-hands?
- Collect questions in writing ahead of time, not just live. Anonymise them if your company has a trust gap on leadership. Answer the hardest question first to show the Q&A is real, not theatre. If a question doesn't get live airtime, answer it in writing within 48 hours.
When to use this template
Monthly or quarterly, depending on company size and pace of change. Weekly all-hands is usually too frequent for the signal it carries. Teams below ~30 people usually don't need a separate all-hands from their weekly meeting.