
All you wanted to know about ‘all-hands’ meetings - gulraj100
https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-all-hands-but-were-afraid-to-ask-b13f7b97f2d9
======
fenomas
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.

~~~
_puk
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.

~~~
fenomas
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.

~~~
bunderbunder
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!"

~~~
alistairSH
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.

------
pc86
> _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?

~~~
clifanatic
We need to schedule daily two-hour meetings to discuss why it's taking so long
to get tasks completed.

~~~
limeyx
I dont have time to schedule that right now. Check back in a few weeks

~~~
clifanatic
I scheduled it for 6 PM since that time block shows empty on your calendar.

------
ryanbrunner
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.

~~~
test1235
>\- 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.

~~~
dagw
_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.

~~~
_Adam
Would love to hear the details

------
swalsh
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.

~~~
dagw
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...

~~~
aedron
Ah, the company-wide version of "Can I see you in my office for a moment?"

------
ungzd
Is this article sarcastic or serious? It's purest corporate bullshit like
"celebrating people". Bangalore management for j2ee bodyshops.

~~~
fredoliveira
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.

~~~
vacri
> _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.

~~~
Bartweiss
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.

------
jandrese
_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.

~~~
EpicEng
Take an upvote from me. It is exactly HR/exec blather used by people who have
nothing to say but like to hear the sound of their own voice.

------
coldcode
I once went to an all-hands meeting where the new CTO said we would all be
millionaires in a year. 10 months later we were out of business.

~~~
clifanatic
He meant "we" as in him and the CEO.

~~~
coldcode
Of course no one got anything. Chapter 7.

------
warcode
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.

------
settsu
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)

------
iskonkul
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.

~~~
techterrier
If you had a singalong at the end of an all hands in Britain, almost everyone
would throw themselves through the nearest window.

~~~
bshimmin
Oh, I don't know; I think with sufficient alcohol a rousing rendition of _Who
ate all the pies_ or something would go down quite well.

~~~
arethuza
"sufficient alcohol"

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.

~~~
bshimmin
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."

------
mobiuscog
I remember how much I enjoyed assembly at school.

Yeah.

------
z3t4
Be careful when awarding people on "all hands" because people can easily think
they are unappreciated.

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.

------
imagist
All I wanted to know about all-hands meetings: how to avoid them.

~~~
the_rosentotter
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.

Been doing it for years.

~~~
imagist
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.

~~~
EpicEng
You don't. If upper management is set on holding them there is likely no
scenario in which being a dissenter ends well for you.

------
TorKlingberg
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.

~~~
soft_dev_person
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.

------
yitchelle
Having it on a Friday may be counter productive?

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.

------
nmgsd
I have never once attended an all-hands meeting that couldn't have been an
email instead.

------
nickpp
Am I the only old/cynical enough to choke on the miasma of BS?!

~~~
mvdwoord
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).

Ok enough cynicism for today. Back to coding!

~~~
VLM
"50k+ employees companies"

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.

------
dunkelheit
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.

~~~
rebeccaskinner
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.

------
partycoder
Usually they follow the format:

\- 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.

~~~
vacri
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...

------
Malarkey73
The first thing I want to know from an "everything you want to know about all-
hands" article is :

What is an 'all hands'?

~~~
throwanem
A meeting attended by everyone in the company.

~~~
VLM
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.

~~~
throwanem
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!

------
vacri
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.

------
taneq
What's an "all-hands"?

~~~
TheAdamist
[http://dilbert.com/strip/2007-07-09](http://dilbert.com/strip/2007-07-09)

------
sickbeard
More like bad-news meeting where I work.

------
Paul_S
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.

