Managing employees is no small task for businesses of any size. Collaborative decision-making and communication between senior leaders and employees can serve as the foundation for dynamic and successful business operations, or, if neglected, become the Achilles heel of a stagnant, fractured organization. All-hands meetings enable company leaders to encourage inter-departmental alignment, collaboration and decision-making. By bringing employees from critical departments together under one roof, departmental higher-ups and executives are able to share progress updates and directly respond to employee concerns.
The most productive all-hands meetings provide opportunities for two-way dialogue and interaction between company leaders and employees. All-hands meetings present an excellent opportunity for senior leaders to convey that a company is sincere in its intentions to hear from employees, encouraging a culture of openness, accountability, and sharing.
But all-hands meetings are not without their difficulties.
Pulling honest opinions from employees in an open-floor setting is challenging. Often, only the most extroverted or talkative people speak up. To address these challenges, HR departments are leveraging audience response systems (ARS) to maximize all-hands meetings’ interactivity and productivity. ARS solutions complete with the following features provide optimum support for organizations looking to improve the effectiveness of all-hands meetings:
Feedback surveying
With real-time feedback surveying, all-hands meeting organizers can collect employees’ opinions on the presentation content as the meeting progresses. This way, organizers can gather real-time, anonymous feedback, which can be fielded to senior leaders for interactive question and answer. By making it as easy as possible for employees to contribute feedback, all-hands meetings improve workplace transparency and trust between senior leaders and employees.
Live polling
Live polling provides a quick and simple way for all-hands meeting organizers to gather real-time opinions from employees and quickly make group decisions on new policies, strategies and more. Instead of loosely measuring employee opinions through hands in the air or applause, live polling provides an efficient and accurate way of counting exact votes.
Top-rated ARS solutions also allow meeting moderators to create new polls during the course of the meeting, and adapt live polls to a fluid flow of conversation. Most also include the option of sharing live poll results, for maximum transparency. With live polls, employees will feel their voices are being heard and come away from all-hands meetings with a sense of communal accomplishment.
Mobile Q&A
While passing microphones in the crowd may work for some, the overwhelming majority of employees don’t have the patience to wait in a long line or courage to stand up, and share their questions in large group settings. By allowing employees to submit questions from their smartphone device, all-hands meetings organizers improve employee engagement and collaboration. Employees can ask questions as they think of them, with anonymity.
Crowd Upvoting
Even a perfectly prepared all-hands presentation may not address questions that the majority of employees across departments are interested in. To avoid this fate, all-hands facilitators can encourage employees to submit and vote on questions before, or during all-hands meetings. With Crowd Upvoting, employees can submit questions and upvote their favorite questions submitted by others. By requesting question submissions before the meeting occurs, all-hands organizers and presenters can ensure that the most important concerns, according to employees themselves, are addressed on the day.
Word Clouds
The work associated with running effective all-hands meetings doesn’t stop when the meeting ends. One of the most important aspects of running successful all-hands meetings is capturing and responding to employee sentiments. Automated word clouds aggregate crowd feedback into easy-to-comprehend, visual snapshots that all-hands leaders can analyze and respond to with ease. Top-rated ARS solutions provide the option of generating word clouds live during meetings, and integrating word clouds into post-meeting data reporting.
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With live audience response solutions, business leaders and HR departments are transforming all-hands meetings into a highly collaborative, productive experiences. Vistacom’s ARS Business Solution combines all of the interactive engagement features discussed above and more, enabling organizations to boost employee satisfaction, develop a pipeline of internal feedback for company leaders, and strengthen connections between departments.
