Just want to share an anecdote of a 500 people company that I'm based in. The company surprisingly nailed all the points that are made by the OP. And the positive effect of having such a weekly Friday All Hands is apparent. This initiative has only been implemented a month ago, and before that there was a sense of low morale in the team as they were in the dark as to the direction of the company and perhaps their work lacked recognition. However, after the implementation of the All Hands, the teams got invigorated by well-deserved recognition from the leaders and in front of everyone. And in general everyone became clearer of the company's mission and key focus through presentations and Q&A. If there are musically inclined folks in the company, it definitely helps to lift the spirit of the team singing along with songs they are playing at the end of it.
If you are a leader of a company considering having All Hands, rolling it out as described in the article could set your team in the right path.
At least one version of OS/2 came with a midi version of Ever Onward buried in its pre-installed sound files. Seeing that songbook makes me hear it all over again.
I remember all-hands meetings like that - one in particular where the CEO tried to buy the hotel at 4am so he could order the bar open. The withering disdain of the barman was quite something.
Mind you this was in Scotland so "sufficient alcohol" really means something.
Sounds like something from Withnail & I! "All right, Miss Blennerhassett, I'm warning you, if you do, you're fired. We are multimillionaires. We shall buy this place and fire you immediately."
> If there are musically inclined folks in the company, it definitely helps to lift the spirit of the team singing along with songs they are playing at the end of it.
There are musically inclined folks everywhere.
I'm pretty musically inclined but dear lord I would never do this, nor would I work anywhere that did.
It's some homosoexual ritual that is common for business in the Bay Area. It's fun if you're into that kind of things, but can be a bit awkward if you're heterosexual or married.
A disruptive meeting wherein all employees of the company are expected to drop everything to hear about what the company had been up to since the last all-hands.
Counterpoint: if you're going to run an all-hands with any kind of frequency, please ensure that virtually all the content is relevant to virtually all the attendees.
I spent many years at an (otherwise excellent) company that did quarterly all-hands meetings, which were de-facto sales events. The country manager (also the president of sales) went through the sales targets, then the sales pipeline, and then handed out awards to those involved in the biggest sales. Usually there followed some kind of presentation from engineering or marketing, with content meant to be useful to the sales staff.
For the people outside of sales there was a bit where other regional managers handed out awards, so at best there was something to look forward to and at worst it was a waste of time. But for the handful of us who also didn't report to one of those managers, the whole thing bordered on demoralizing.
If the company is small enough, and the all-hands frequent enough, those awards become a 'who haven't we given an award to yet', which ultimately undermines the point of giving it out in the first place.
>those awards become a 'who haven't we given an award to yet' //
Why would it matter, surely you award those who've acted exemplary regardless of prior awards. A company that handed out rewards in any other fashion would be unusual, wouldn't it?
Having been on exec teams that have chosen who to give these rewards to, there's always an enormous amount of politics in the decision to who to give the reward to. Who's received in in the past is definitely a factor.
There's nothing wrong with recognizing people per se. It doesn't need to be a "biggest X of the year" award, either - just calling someone up because they've just finished a 6-month project successfully is a fine thing to do in an all-hands. In a big enough company it's worth it just so people know what other orgs are doing.
My point was just that it can be tedious/demoralizing for people who aren't eligible to be called up.
As someone who doesn't work on client facing stuff, I've found the recognition section does become tedious and slightly demoralizing over time. At least where I've worked, the awards always go to someone who made a big sale or went the extra mile for a specific client, which means that folks whose job is to build the product are effectively not eligible. Or if they are recognized, it's always for a generic team accomplishment, which ends up feeling like, "$group_of_20_people hit a delivery target! Golf clap everyone!"
Yeah, I've noticed that there's never any recognition of anything I'm involved in from anyone I don't report to. I can only conclude from this that the work I'm assigned doesn't actually matter all that much to the rest of the company.
It's very tempting to phone it in while looking for another job. It's basically a meeting for QA and manufacturing to remind everyone about QA and manufacturing.
Push your org to implement some sort of peer-recognition system.
My employer's (large commercial software company) award system is peer-based - anybody can suggest an award, from simple kudos up to multi-thousand dollar awards. Kudos don't require approval and are typically announced in weekly or monthly team meetings. The larger things are announced in the division or company-wide meetings, as appropriate.
The system actually doesn't allow generic team awards. It can be a bit annoying, but it also prevents what you describe. If I want to recognize a team, I have to call out each person individually.
As a project manager (but with no direct reports), I try to award a few kudos per quarter, just to let my peers (including all the teams I work with regularly, that's 50 developers/testers) know I'm paying attention. I typically submit a few larger awards per year. So far, I haven't had any outright rejected by my director or VP, only the level adjusted (both up and down).
Edit - another thought - I also proactively seek feedback from product management and sales. It doesn't take a lot of feedback to make a difference in team morale. While my teams are directly client facing, it's not difficult to obtain client feedback that is directly relevant to my projects.
Do they really need to be formal awards, and not just "And a big thanks you to Cindy for her work on project X!" (followed by a sentence or two about why X matters).
In a small team, if you can't toss a kudos for an employee once in a while it means that you don't know what he's doing, or he needs help to improve his work.
Haha, sounds a lot like and reminds me of assembly back in school. Sit there for an hour or two to hear how well the rowing team or the rugby team went, listen to a speech or two by some coaches and be generally thoroughly bored through the whole thing.
Never quite understood the purpose of those assemblies, and I still don't.
- Good news: Funny opening, exciting new projects and features, awards, new hires. Everyone is great, smart, talented, the best. Don't quit, refer your friends.
- Bad news: The company is not profitable and everyone needs to work harder so the company can be sold at a higher price. Some random self-help phrase to close.
Basically, get everyone to lower their guard, then unload the bullshit.
One company I worked at made medical equipment and had these quarterly-to-half-yearly all-hands. The CEO, famous for fleecing his own company would invariably tell us to 'tighten our belts'. I almost started running a pool as to how far through the meeting that phrase would appear.
One 'funny' thing about all-hands was the Q&A section - no-one ever asked anything (maybe the occasional softball) apart from us support guys. "Where are the extra support staff you promised?". One all-hands I was away off-site with the other support tech, and it threw the cadence of the all-hands off, apparently, as "and this is about the time the support guys complain..." (not actually said, but what everyone was expecting).
The company is still somehow running, but it's always been tight on money. After I left I heard the tale from a colleague still there, about how they had orders from customers, finished stock to fill those orders, and they couldn't ship... because they were on credit hold with the cardboard shipping box suppliers for non-payment...
In theory. In practice people schedule vacation that week simply to avoid it. Some company roles literally can't be abandoned for health and safety reasons or business practice reasons so they get to skip. Many people will schedule 3rd party conflicts to avoid a meeting (well I could have met with the local power company rep/engineer any time this quarter to discuss a facility upgrade but it just happens that supposedly his only open time is during the "all hands", oh how convenient for me.) People will also schedule training and conferences to avoid it. Well I don't use PHP but there's a PHP meetup during the quarterly all hands so ... I know service techs who pad overtime jobs till 2am the night before just so that driving across the state for an all hands would be a felony violation of CDL/OSHA max time behind the wheel regulations, and do it every single time.
Wow. I really had no idea of the potential range of dodges! Should I find myself again at a company that engages in this practice, I'll put your advice to good use. Thank you very kindly for sharing it here!
From the order "all hands on deck", perhaps so that the captain can address the entire crew from the sterncastle.
In my experience, this is the sort of meeting that completely wastes a shocking amount of everyone's time, and the Flavor-ade that HR always distributes there tastes very strange.
In my opinion, a company-wide mandatory meeting should be held no more often than owner/shareholder meetings, and only for time-sensitive issues that affect the entire company, such that you want everyone to hear that news, spun correctly from your good ol' trustworthy and reliable CEO, instead of getting rumors with varying levels of substantiation from the Internet.
If you want to give out awards and reinforce corporate culture, make that a voluntary meeting, and bribe people to come to it with gratis food and drink, or door prizes, or some form of entertainment.
Nope, I mean.. I would definitely like to work at a place where there is an all-hands and I actually appreciate it. They exist. Spend any significant portion of your life at any of the 50k+ employees companies and you'll end up cynical about this kind of thing.
We have one scheduled for today (Yay!) and I'm already looking forward to the incompetent mucking about with the mute buttons (or lack thereof) and enjoying twenty minutes of "Can everyone please put the call on mute?" screaming children and people doing the dishes in the background) followed by a bunch of delusional execs handing each other "awards" for stuff that in reality never happened (but we pretend to because contractual obligations).
Funny I was going to mention exactly that, having been there.
1) In my experience it doesn't scale past 1000 or so people and once you literally have offices all over the planet you run into timezone issues. So state/city/country whatever it takes to get attendance below 1000.
2) An appropriate party game is something like duct taping 1000 envelopes of gift certificates underneath each chair, no matter how little, and then surprising people halfway thru when about a quarter of the attendees are asleep, and opening a trading market to wake everyone up. Or a raffle halfway thru to wake people up. An inappropriate party game is watching the execs have a rap battle, or watching the execs play blackjack, or trying to get the audience involved in anything "teambuilding"
3) Speaking of "no matter how little" above, that doesn't count for food. People drove across entire states for hours and rearranged their private lives extensively to attend... serving cold pancakes and cold breakfast sausage (but only two per person!) is a false economy WRT morale. If you're standing in line for food and the primary comment by coworkers is "thank god I stopped for breakfast on the way here" then your meeting failed.
4) OPs article correctly mentioned top line metrics. Oh god help me I've spent hours in meetings listening to production managers of a plant I'll never see or visit spend fifteen minutes talking about the inner details of how they modified a grease gun to better match the viscosity of a new dielectric grease and you've got an entire auditorium of a thousand blank expressions tuned out. If you think the entire company cares about how you reorganized the pencils in supply room #35 in plant #51 you are simply wrong. If you're around long enough you'll attend all hands meeting where no amount of caffeine can save you. Just awful.
5) Front line supvr will use all hands meetings as a punishment. You broke the build you have to go. Its enough to make people go postal or at least call in sick the day of the meeting. If all hands meeting sick/vacation days are 10% or more than non-all hands meetings, you are doing meetings wrong.
6) Likewise don't tell the execs, but anyone attending remotely or calling in, isn't paying any attention.
You are not. (And it's no wonder SV has little use for devs older than 30! We're not nearly so easy to sucker into burning ourselves out building something for someone else to sell.)
This is a manual on how to run a propaganda event. My question is - how to avoid turning these meetings into propaganda events? Usually the fear of "hurting the morale of the troops" is so big that these events are sugarcoated to a disgusting level.
I feel like in most cases it's impossible to avoid hurting moral a little if you're being honest about the company, you just have to decide if you're okay with it or not. Businesses have ups and downs and there are always going to be some sales that were lost, some project that's behind, some budget that needs to get trimmed. Even in successful companies not everything is going to be successful.
Most people I think want transparency, but it's so rare in reality, especially in meetings like that, that people don't really know what to do when they actually get it. I think a lot of companies are running on more risk and thinner margins than people expect, and being transparent about that can hurt morale for a while because I think in a lot of cases the sugar coating has been thicker than people realized and the reality is a bit more stark.
The up-side to it I think is that in the long term it can lead to a better team. People are more honest and loyal to leaders who don't shy away from the truth when it's uncomfortable, and there's less panic when a budget is cut or a project canceled, or even people laid off, when people can see what the business realities are that lead to those decisions.
Maybe I've just been through some tough times, but whenever I see a meeting invite that starts with "all-hands", my gut turns, and I think "here comes the layoffs and project cancellations". If it's sent only a few hours before hand, it's a sure sign.
Right. The president of one company I worked for liked to have an all-hands meeting irregularly, but about once a month. Eventually I told him that, without an agenda listed, I was always afraid that it was a disaster announcement.
After that, every all-hands email had a body with two or three bullet points in it.
Yea. At one place I worked at we got an "all-hands, all-offices" meeting invite out of the blue. All offices where required to connect to the main office via video link. No agenda, no clues and this sort of thing never happened at this company. Even senior managers had no idea what was going on. Of course rumors started flying, resumes got updated and people where firing up their contingency plans.
Anyway, meeting happened and the CEO proudly announced that the company was getting a new logo...
I think this is a parallel usage. At the last SV company I was in, "all-hands" was the set name for a recurring meeting (scheduled way in advance) with a set itinerary similar to what's in the article (announcements, staff anniversaries, etc). They were never used for sudden announcements or bad news.
Reading the article I expect the HN comments to be really negative, but I think he's right. As a company grows it's very easy for people to feel like unimportant cogs in a machine. All-hands meetings with the top leadership is great to let everyone know where the company is going.
Probably, but in reality it's either used as an opportunity for upper management to pat themselves on the back in front of all the employees, or to ask everyone to "walk the extra mile" (for the nth time) because business is going awry.
It is possible to let folks know where the company is going without incinerating an hour of everyone's time (far more than an hour for exec staff that are part of "the show").
Moreover, the author says his company, Square, has an all-hands every two weeks! I've heard great things about Square, but other companies should NOT "try this at home". It works for them, but it would be a disaster at most other places.
I don't know where to begin. Maybe with the fact that I didn't write the article, but that it is obviously not sarcastic.
I don't know about your work experience, but in the context of a larger company, all-hands are quite important to remind people of the company culture and to connect individuals to the mission. Spend long enough in a growing company and you'll see people who have no idea why they're important, who slack, who feel they aren't heard, etc. Building a great company means handling all of this.
All-hands aren't about corporate bullshit. Even in a smaller startup, celebrating things like "we got a major new client" or "we hit this important milestone" can make people refocus and rekindle their passion for the work. I can't even see how this is "bangalore management for j2ee bodyshops". But I haven't been to Bangalore or done any j2ee work (bless up), so maybe that's it.
> in the context of a larger company, all-hands are quite important to remind people of the company culture and to connect individuals to the mission.
In a larger company the culture is a thing that probably nobody should try to
connect to, and mission is usually long lost in the transition from small
company to a large one.
> Spend long enough in a growing company and you'll see people who have no idea why they're important, who slack, who feel they aren't heard, etc.
And gathering all of them together every six months for no good reason so they
can be "celebrated" by some guy they have nothing to do at all will make them
feel heard or important?
> Even in a smaller startup, celebrating things like "we got a major new client" or "we hit this important milestone" can make people refocus and rekindle their passion for the work.
In small company "we got a major client" is an important thing. In a big
company, a regular employee couldn't care less, as it won't affect him/her in
any meaningful way.
> all-hands are quite important to remind people of the company culture and to connect individuals to the mission
The article is proposing weekly meetings for up to 500 employees. If they need reminding that often, then I reckon you have a hiring problem.
Where I am now, there is a formal all-hands that takes most of a day once/year, plus all-hands at appropriate junctures (big client/important milestone stuff), and it seems to work well. There isn't the idea of this fortnightly or weekly meeting. I just can't fathom wasting that much time to talk about mission.
You don't "talk about mission" in these meetings, you talk about things the company did that week/whatever which further the mission, such as a product launch, partnership, event, or major announcement.
My experience has been that a monthly all-hands for 200 people is pretty good. More frequent meetings than that should be smaller, because the alternative is talking about group-specific stuff that's irrelevant to most people.
Your company should subdivide as it grows, and the meeting/governance structure should acknowledge that fact. Weekly for 500 people sounds insane.
>>>all-hands are quite important to remind people of the company culture and to connect individuals to the mission.
My mission is to trade my labor and experience for currency I can use to fund my life.
That is all
>All-hands aren't about corporate bullshit.
Yes it is. This entire concept of "we are a team" or worse "we are a family" is bullshit, the second it is more profitable for the company to not employ you than it is for the company to employ you, you are shown the door.
Culture isn't something one needs to be reminded of. It is whatever it is at the moment, and you don't change that with cringeworthy rah rah corporate BS
I think all-hands meetings have real value, if only for keeping a coherent organization.
But a line like "every attendee feels invigorated, empowered, and educated" is a bit stomach-churning - if you set your goals that high your meeting is guaranteed to be a flop.
I have had AHM on the Friday afternoon. Most of the attendees either fell asleep (metaphorically) or wanted to get off early to start the weekend. However, if presentation was engaging, things would have been very different.
Ugh, an hour-plus every week to hear management blather on about the mission for 60% of that time? You folks have fun at that, I'm going to sit back here and write another glue script.
The last company I worked at did an "all-hands" meeting every day, for 9 minutes just before lunch. It actually worked incredibly well - 9 minutes out of every day is nothing, comparatively speaking, and the insanely compressed format puts pressure on everyone to not waste time with anything. It scaled really well from 20 - 150 people. It was great for hiring too - we could bring candidates in and give them a quick 9 minute overview of what was happening around the company and what the culture was like.
A couple of things that I think differentiate good all-hands from bad ones (daily or otherwise)
- As much as possible, rank-and-file employees should drive the show. Having management up there talking the whole time increases the mandatory boring meeting feeling.
- If you're running all hands, your number one priority is to eliminate any feeling of big company corporate "rah-rah" culture. It's really easy for all-hands to feel fake with lots of imposed cheery "culture" things (someone else in the comments mentioned a singalong.. Really? It's cool to have unique things that you guys as a company do, but they have to be organic. Coming up with them as a manager basically guarantees that everyone laughs at them behind your back.
- Your priority should be providing useful information to employees, not pushing things on them. If the all-hands becomes the "yell about sales targets" meeting everyone will hate them.
>- If you're running all hands, your number one priority is to eliminate any feeling of big company corporate "rah-rah" culture. It's really easy for all-hands to feel fake with lots of imposed cheery "culture" things (someone else in the comments mentioned a singalong.. Really? It's cool to have unique things that you guys as a company do, but they have to be organic. Coming up with them as a manager basically guarantees that everyone laughs at them behind your back.
This is precisely where I work at the moment. I always suspected it might've been a US/UK contrast. In UK we like to laugh at ourselves and not take anything too seriously, but being a US company, we get a lot of the "YOU'RE NUMBER 1, WE'RE NUMBER 1, WE'RE THE BEST TEAM WE CAN BE TOGETHER" and to be honest, it's rather cringey.
We're a megacorp who answers to shareholders - they don't give a crap about me and the guy talking most certainly doesn't know who I am, so let's stop the pretense. I've no problem with the pecking order, but don't make out like the company is looking out for my interest.
I always suspected it might've been a US/UK contrast.
Probably the biggest management clusterfuck I've ever experience involved a manager from California trying to manage a bunch of Norwegians in Oslo like he was still in San Francisco.
It's also because the starry-eyed loudmouths in HR always gets to set the agenda, since the introverted engineers don't say anything. So you get chants, 'funny' party games, etc. And of course if you at any point seem like you are not 100% supportive of this you might as well have stomped on their kitten.
Were these meetings electronic/telephonic? I'm trying to imagine how many minutes it takes 100-150 people to gather in a single room for a 9-minute meeting.
In person at every office, over a GotoMeeting for people out of offices. It definitely gets packed and standing room only, but for 9 minutes that's not a huge deal.
Assembling people isn't too bad if everyone knows it's a "thing" every single day. Music pipes through the offices at 3 minutes before the meeting, and the meeting starts regardless of who's there.
We're 100+ people and have one first thing every Monday morning. There's a set agenda that is usually speedily read through by a random "rank and file" member with executives usually only chiming in to a) clarify a point or b) have something important for the entire company to hear.
I think all your points are excellent for companies that do want to do this and I actually find it a good way to kick off the week.
I would definitely be skipping it (and possibly getting in trouble) were it to happen around lunch instead of the start of the first day of the workweek. Sounds lame but I consider my lunch time 'sacred' and helps me clear my head for the afternoon.
It's "just before" lunch (starts at 11:51 and goes to 12). There's not a mandated lunch hour, but the catered stuff gets there at noon and most people take it then. Absolutely the meeting is not considered part of your lunch time at all.
That's cool if they're very strict about the end time. The one I mentioned for our Mondays can be anywhere from 15 min to much much longer if there is a lot of programming (presentations by different departments, partner speeches).
Yeah, being insanely strict about the time was probably the biggest challenge at first but something that we got down to a science after some practice. Everything is scheduled to the minute and there's zero appetite for anything going over (to the point of forcibly taking the mic from someone).
Ah, yes. "Invigorated", by being with tons of other people, not knowing if you are gonna be put in the spotlight at any time. Also known as "exhausted" if you are introverted.
Unless the all-hands involves an open bar you can stick it up your bum. There is nothing there you can't fit in an email without wasting an afternoon for the whole company... and hiring a venue, organising transport, recording & streaming etc.
> company All-Hands should be run weekly, till the company gets to several (~five) hundred people
Sweet baby Jesus and the orphans, no.
I may be biased, because I've never worked for a company that did a true all-hands meeting. My largest employer (~32k FTEs) did a department wide IS meeting (~800) quarterly but it largely just a review of what had happened on the business side in the last three months.
I can't think of a single legitimate reason for a company of ~400 to meet every single week. That's ten man weeks of time lost, every single week, so an SVP half the employees don't know can let everybody know Susie in Finance has been here for a year on Thursday?
A few minutes before the meeting, you slip away to the washroom. When you're sure everyone has left, you go back to your desk and resume work in the peace and quiet of an empty office. A few minutes before the meeting is scheduled to end, you slip away again, and only return when everyone else has. No one will know if you were there or not with 50+ people present. If someone shows up during the meeting you say you forgot, or you are working on this critical task or whatever.
Meh, that's too passive-aggressive for me. I'm perfectly okay with clicking decline on an invite and not going--no need to hide it. I guess what I was really asking was how do I persuade my company to not try to waste my time with all-hands meetings.
Shouldn't "all-hands" events should be reserved exclusively for dispensing information that cannot or should not be dispensed by any other means? And I'm not so cynical to acknowledge the value of, for example, collective celebrations where C-level execs simply want to demonstrate genuine joy and pride for a company achievement.
However, given enough time, any indefinitely scheduled meeting* too often tends to resort to filler when there is nothing to report, since anyone who's job routinely involves setting up meetings probably has some metric attached to such activities, whether explicitly or implied (this typically being a people-herding/middle management/non-production role.) The result being the value proposition of such a meeting plummets and even when the meetings would be necessary, the attendees have already disengaged due to prior experience.
*exclusions might be short, focused events with a well-defined goal inside a specific context such as Agile-style daily standup which incorporate reporting, course-correction, and ad-hoc resource management in a very brief timeframe (<15 minutes)
An All-Hands does three things. It celebrates people and accomplishments; it drive alignment around mission, strategy and priorities;
I couldn't read past this part. It has corporate HR blather right at the top. If you see wording like this in a meeting proposal it is guaranteed to be a huge waste of time.
I see I'm being downvoted for this opinion, but I ask you. What exactly does it mean to "drive alignment" in real terms. What are you going to do differently? It's nonsense words that HR uses make it sound like they're important to making your products.
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At least one version of OS/2 came with a midi version of Ever Onward buried in its pre-installed sound files. Seeing that songbook makes me hear it all over again.
I remember all-hands meetings like that - one in particular where the CEO tried to buy the hotel at 4am so he could order the bar open. The withering disdain of the barman was quite something.
Mind you this was in Scotland so "sufficient alcohol" really means something.
There are musically inclined folks everywhere.
I'm pretty musically inclined but dear lord I would never do this, nor would I work anywhere that did.
I spent many years at an (otherwise excellent) company that did quarterly all-hands meetings, which were de-facto sales events. The country manager (also the president of sales) went through the sales targets, then the sales pipeline, and then handed out awards to those involved in the biggest sales. Usually there followed some kind of presentation from engineering or marketing, with content meant to be useful to the sales staff.
For the people outside of sales there was a bit where other regional managers handed out awards, so at best there was something to look forward to and at worst it was a waste of time. But for the handful of us who also didn't report to one of those managers, the whole thing bordered on demoralizing.
Why would it matter, surely you award those who've acted exemplary regardless of prior awards. A company that handed out rewards in any other fashion would be unusual, wouldn't it?
My point was just that it can be tedious/demoralizing for people who aren't eligible to be called up.
It's very tempting to phone it in while looking for another job. It's basically a meeting for QA and manufacturing to remind everyone about QA and manufacturing.
My employer's (large commercial software company) award system is peer-based - anybody can suggest an award, from simple kudos up to multi-thousand dollar awards. Kudos don't require approval and are typically announced in weekly or monthly team meetings. The larger things are announced in the division or company-wide meetings, as appropriate.
The system actually doesn't allow generic team awards. It can be a bit annoying, but it also prevents what you describe. If I want to recognize a team, I have to call out each person individually.
As a project manager (but with no direct reports), I try to award a few kudos per quarter, just to let my peers (including all the teams I work with regularly, that's 50 developers/testers) know I'm paying attention. I typically submit a few larger awards per year. So far, I haven't had any outright rejected by my director or VP, only the level adjusted (both up and down).
Edit - another thought - I also proactively seek feedback from product management and sales. It doesn't take a lot of feedback to make a difference in team morale. While my teams are directly client facing, it's not difficult to obtain client feedback that is directly relevant to my projects.
Never quite understood the purpose of those assemblies, and I still don't.
- Good news: Funny opening, exciting new projects and features, awards, new hires. Everyone is great, smart, talented, the best. Don't quit, refer your friends.
- Bad news: The company is not profitable and everyone needs to work harder so the company can be sold at a higher price. Some random self-help phrase to close.
Basically, get everyone to lower their guard, then unload the bullshit.
One 'funny' thing about all-hands was the Q&A section - no-one ever asked anything (maybe the occasional softball) apart from us support guys. "Where are the extra support staff you promised?". One all-hands I was away off-site with the other support tech, and it threw the cadence of the all-hands off, apparently, as "and this is about the time the support guys complain..." (not actually said, but what everyone was expecting).
The company is still somehow running, but it's always been tight on money. After I left I heard the tale from a colleague still there, about how they had orders from customers, finished stock to fill those orders, and they couldn't ship... because they were on credit hold with the cardboard shipping box suppliers for non-payment...
What is an 'all hands'?
In my experience, this is the sort of meeting that completely wastes a shocking amount of everyone's time, and the Flavor-ade that HR always distributes there tastes very strange.
In my opinion, a company-wide mandatory meeting should be held no more often than owner/shareholder meetings, and only for time-sensitive issues that affect the entire company, such that you want everyone to hear that news, spun correctly from your good ol' trustworthy and reliable CEO, instead of getting rumors with varying levels of substantiation from the Internet.
If you want to give out awards and reinforce corporate culture, make that a voluntary meeting, and bribe people to come to it with gratis food and drink, or door prizes, or some form of entertainment.
We have one scheduled for today (Yay!) and I'm already looking forward to the incompetent mucking about with the mute buttons (or lack thereof) and enjoying twenty minutes of "Can everyone please put the call on mute?" screaming children and people doing the dishes in the background) followed by a bunch of delusional execs handing each other "awards" for stuff that in reality never happened (but we pretend to because contractual obligations).
Ok enough cynicism for today. Back to coding!
Funny I was going to mention exactly that, having been there.
1) In my experience it doesn't scale past 1000 or so people and once you literally have offices all over the planet you run into timezone issues. So state/city/country whatever it takes to get attendance below 1000.
2) An appropriate party game is something like duct taping 1000 envelopes of gift certificates underneath each chair, no matter how little, and then surprising people halfway thru when about a quarter of the attendees are asleep, and opening a trading market to wake everyone up. Or a raffle halfway thru to wake people up. An inappropriate party game is watching the execs have a rap battle, or watching the execs play blackjack, or trying to get the audience involved in anything "teambuilding"
3) Speaking of "no matter how little" above, that doesn't count for food. People drove across entire states for hours and rearranged their private lives extensively to attend... serving cold pancakes and cold breakfast sausage (but only two per person!) is a false economy WRT morale. If you're standing in line for food and the primary comment by coworkers is "thank god I stopped for breakfast on the way here" then your meeting failed.
4) OPs article correctly mentioned top line metrics. Oh god help me I've spent hours in meetings listening to production managers of a plant I'll never see or visit spend fifteen minutes talking about the inner details of how they modified a grease gun to better match the viscosity of a new dielectric grease and you've got an entire auditorium of a thousand blank expressions tuned out. If you think the entire company cares about how you reorganized the pencils in supply room #35 in plant #51 you are simply wrong. If you're around long enough you'll attend all hands meeting where no amount of caffeine can save you. Just awful.
5) Front line supvr will use all hands meetings as a punishment. You broke the build you have to go. Its enough to make people go postal or at least call in sick the day of the meeting. If all hands meeting sick/vacation days are 10% or more than non-all hands meetings, you are doing meetings wrong.
6) Likewise don't tell the execs, but anyone attending remotely or calling in, isn't paying any attention.
Most people I think want transparency, but it's so rare in reality, especially in meetings like that, that people don't really know what to do when they actually get it. I think a lot of companies are running on more risk and thinner margins than people expect, and being transparent about that can hurt morale for a while because I think in a lot of cases the sugar coating has been thicker than people realized and the reality is a bit more stark.
The up-side to it I think is that in the long term it can lead to a better team. People are more honest and loyal to leaders who don't shy away from the truth when it's uncomfortable, and there's less panic when a budget is cut or a project canceled, or even people laid off, when people can see what the business realities are that lead to those decisions.
After that, every all-hands email had a body with two or three bullet points in it.
Anyway, meeting happened and the CEO proudly announced that the company was getting a new logo...
Short-notice all-hands are often bad news and should be reserved for truly major breaking news (good or bad).
Moreover, the author says his company, Square, has an all-hands every two weeks! I've heard great things about Square, but other companies should NOT "try this at home". It works for them, but it would be a disaster at most other places.
Absolutely agreed. But you don't need more than 1-2 of those meetings a year.
Or conversely if the company is going somewhere different every two weeks then the company probably has some bigger problems to deal with.
Also do not have debates. Do that in groups of five so everyone get to contribute.
Do talk about the company motivation, mission and priorities though.
I don't know about your work experience, but in the context of a larger company, all-hands are quite important to remind people of the company culture and to connect individuals to the mission. Spend long enough in a growing company and you'll see people who have no idea why they're important, who slack, who feel they aren't heard, etc. Building a great company means handling all of this.
All-hands aren't about corporate bullshit. Even in a smaller startup, celebrating things like "we got a major new client" or "we hit this important milestone" can make people refocus and rekindle their passion for the work. I can't even see how this is "bangalore management for j2ee bodyshops". But I haven't been to Bangalore or done any j2ee work (bless up), so maybe that's it.
In a larger company the culture is a thing that probably nobody should try to connect to, and mission is usually long lost in the transition from small company to a large one.
> Spend long enough in a growing company and you'll see people who have no idea why they're important, who slack, who feel they aren't heard, etc.
And gathering all of them together every six months for no good reason so they can be "celebrated" by some guy they have nothing to do at all will make them feel heard or important?
> Even in a smaller startup, celebrating things like "we got a major new client" or "we hit this important milestone" can make people refocus and rekindle their passion for the work.
In small company "we got a major client" is an important thing. In a big company, a regular employee couldn't care less, as it won't affect him/her in any meaningful way.
The article is proposing weekly meetings for up to 500 employees. If they need reminding that often, then I reckon you have a hiring problem.
Where I am now, there is a formal all-hands that takes most of a day once/year, plus all-hands at appropriate junctures (big client/important milestone stuff), and it seems to work well. There isn't the idea of this fortnightly or weekly meeting. I just can't fathom wasting that much time to talk about mission.
Your company should subdivide as it grows, and the meeting/governance structure should acknowledge that fact. Weekly for 500 people sounds insane.
My mission is to trade my labor and experience for currency I can use to fund my life.
That is all
>All-hands aren't about corporate bullshit.
Yes it is. This entire concept of "we are a team" or worse "we are a family" is bullshit, the second it is more profitable for the company to not employ you than it is for the company to employ you, you are shown the door.
But a line like "every attendee feels invigorated, empowered, and educated" is a bit stomach-churning - if you set your goals that high your meeting is guaranteed to be a flop.
Yeah.
I have had AHM on the Friday afternoon. Most of the attendees either fell asleep (metaphorically) or wanted to get off early to start the weekend. However, if presentation was engaging, things would have been very different.
A couple of things that I think differentiate good all-hands from bad ones (daily or otherwise)
- As much as possible, rank-and-file employees should drive the show. Having management up there talking the whole time increases the mandatory boring meeting feeling.
- If you're running all hands, your number one priority is to eliminate any feeling of big company corporate "rah-rah" culture. It's really easy for all-hands to feel fake with lots of imposed cheery "culture" things (someone else in the comments mentioned a singalong.. Really? It's cool to have unique things that you guys as a company do, but they have to be organic. Coming up with them as a manager basically guarantees that everyone laughs at them behind your back.
- Your priority should be providing useful information to employees, not pushing things on them. If the all-hands becomes the "yell about sales targets" meeting everyone will hate them.
This is precisely where I work at the moment. I always suspected it might've been a US/UK contrast. In UK we like to laugh at ourselves and not take anything too seriously, but being a US company, we get a lot of the "YOU'RE NUMBER 1, WE'RE NUMBER 1, WE'RE THE BEST TEAM WE CAN BE TOGETHER" and to be honest, it's rather cringey.
We're a megacorp who answers to shareholders - they don't give a crap about me and the guy talking most certainly doesn't know who I am, so let's stop the pretense. I've no problem with the pecking order, but don't make out like the company is looking out for my interest.
Probably the biggest management clusterfuck I've ever experience involved a manager from California trying to manage a bunch of Norwegians in Oslo like he was still in San Francisco.
Assembling people isn't too bad if everyone knows it's a "thing" every single day. Music pipes through the offices at 3 minutes before the meeting, and the meeting starts regardless of who's there.
I think all your points are excellent for companies that do want to do this and I actually find it a good way to kick off the week.
I would definitely be skipping it (and possibly getting in trouble) were it to happen around lunch instead of the start of the first day of the workweek. Sounds lame but I consider my lunch time 'sacred' and helps me clear my head for the afternoon.
Sweet baby Jesus and the orphans, no.
I may be biased, because I've never worked for a company that did a true all-hands meeting. My largest employer (~32k FTEs) did a department wide IS meeting (~800) quarterly but it largely just a review of what had happened on the business side in the last three months.
I can't think of a single legitimate reason for a company of ~400 to meet every single week. That's ten man weeks of time lost, every single week, so an SVP half the employees don't know can let everybody know Susie in Finance has been here for a year on Thursday?
Been doing it for years.
However, given enough time, any indefinitely scheduled meeting* too often tends to resort to filler when there is nothing to report, since anyone who's job routinely involves setting up meetings probably has some metric attached to such activities, whether explicitly or implied (this typically being a people-herding/middle management/non-production role.) The result being the value proposition of such a meeting plummets and even when the meetings would be necessary, the attendees have already disengaged due to prior experience.
*exclusions might be short, focused events with a well-defined goal inside a specific context such as Agile-style daily standup which incorporate reporting, course-correction, and ad-hoc resource management in a very brief timeframe (<15 minutes)
I couldn't read past this part. It has corporate HR blather right at the top. If you see wording like this in a meeting proposal it is guaranteed to be a huge waste of time.
I see I'm being downvoted for this opinion, but I ask you. What exactly does it mean to "drive alignment" in real terms. What are you going to do differently? It's nonsense words that HR uses make it sound like they're important to making your products.