All Hands: Take Questions in Advance

And now for something different: just some pragmatic advice. You should run all hands meetings in your company. They are a key bonding and communication opportunity. You can have them until you are quite large – for instance, Twilio, which as gone public, still does them. Here is the key though: make sure to solicit questions and topics ahead of time. You should even make it possible for employees to do so anonymously.

For some people that seems obvious but I have seen quite a few situations where founders were counting on employees to ask questions spontaneously. And that won’t happen. Most people do not want to stick their hand up and ask a question in such an open setting. I also just skimmed a couple of articles on how to run all hands meetings online and was surprised to find that many of them did not mention this critical element.