Virtual Town hall meetings are the best place to bring organizations together to exchange business ideas, company goals, progress, and customer wins. 

With remote work being in popularity, asking the staff to meet in an in-person town hall seems quite impossible. 

Hence, the advancement in technology and video conferencing has made virtual town hall meetings possible. Employees can now attend meetings from across the globe. 

So, what exactly is a virtual town hall meeting? What are the benefits of conducting one? And what are the tips for conducting an engaging virtual town hall meeting?

Let’s dive right into it and find out the answers to all the questions.

What is a Virtual Town Hall Meeting (VTH)?

Virtual town hall meetings are large-scale broadcasting events with a limited number of speaking to a large audience. Town hall events have a wide range of purposes– they are corporate meetings, addressing students from across the world, and appearances by high-profile speakers. 

Virtual town halls involve only a limited number of people communicating with the audience. Make sure to use presentation and pre-recording features in your town hall meeting. 

The virtual meetings have an all-hands discussion tactic and this generates a sense of community among the employees. Such meetings allow an organization’s employees to speak and be visible to the world. 

Why is VTH important?  

In the digital age, hosting town hall meetings virtually is highly valuable. Let’s dive into the importance of holding virtual town hall meetings and provide your ideas to host an effective one. 

1. Location is not an obstacle 

Businesses normally support virtual workplaces in the 21st century. With the rise in remote work, video meetings and organizations with satellite offices have comparatively increased in the world. 

It has made communication and employee engagement pretty simple through virtual town hall meetings. Company events can be broadcasted on a large scale and take your internal communication to another level.

There are numerous webcasting tools that you can use to conduct a large virtual town hall meeting. 

2. Increase employee engagement 

It is impossible to hold employees’ attention in a fast-paced business. The main reason behind this involves a lack of employee belief in senior management. The poor relationship between employees and managers and lack of pride in working.

Creating better communication channels between the high-level employees and the other company employees will most likely solve the problem of poor communication. 

Conduct town hall meetings and introduce live chat, breakout sessions, live polling, and live chat feature in the presentations. 

3. Thought Leadership

Along with everything else, mastering the execution and use of virtual town hall meetings can help modernize business communications. Technology and thought leadership go hand-in-hand. 

Virtual town hall meetings are convenient and time-saving and management facilitates these processes. Going for a unique and engaging virtual meeting for the employees can make a huge difference to your organization’s workings. 

4. Showcase Company Culture

Virtual town hall meetings help organizations to build trust, fun, and community for the employees. Taking active participation in the process can help increase the efficacy of internal communications. 

Having a fun personality can help you organize a memorable town hall meeting.  Use creative visuals and have pre-planned questions to encourage employee participation in the meeting. 

How to engage your audience in Virtual Town Hall Meetings?

Virtual town hall meetings can be overwhelming and keeping the attendees engaged has to be the biggest challenge ever. So, here are a few ways how you can engage your audience in virtual town hall meetings. 

1. Use compelling Visual content

The most powerful tool is interactivity. If you want maximum engagement in a virtual event, go ahead and utilize the fun elements such as quizzes, Q&A, and chat rooms. This will keep your audience focused and involved in the meeting.

2. Track the real-time analytics

Real-time analytics can help you understand if your audience is actively engaging and responding to your presentation by using interactive features. Analyze the attendance and participation level by using analytics. 

3. Plan Breaks

If your event is expected to last for a long period then plan breaks in between. This will let your employees refresh themselves and get them ready for the rest of the session. 

Breaks help everyone to stay focused and are crucial for attendees, organizers, and employees to recharge. 

The one way to figure out the break timing is to again analyze the real-time analytics and features that will show you when the engagement rate drops and your audience needs to stretch. 

4. Use a moderator 

To ensure that everything runs smoothly, assign a meeting moderator in video conferences and discussions with a larger audience. 

Moderators are advanced at in-call controls and have the accessibility to mute and unmute participants in the meeting. In addition to this, they can also lock and unlock meetings, stop a presentation, or remove an attendee. 

5. Allow a Variety of speakers to speak

The same speaker can make the town hall super monotonous and predictable. It is always better to allow a variety of speakers from different management levels to speak and put forth their ideas and opinions.

This allows room for a variety of perspectives and a true sense of what’s going on in the organization.

6. Keep it simple

Lastly, it’s advisable to keep the meeting sweet and simple. Avoid using difficult phrases and hard-to-understand jargon. Also, remove hard-to-understand slides from your presentation and keep the visuals super simple. 

Don’t overly complicate the message and keep it sweet, simple, understandable, and to the point. 

Conclusion

There are numerous ways of holding an engaging virtual town hall meeting every year. You need to host a ton of virtual events to get better at it with each passing event. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re holding a short town hall meeting or one throughout the quarter, your communication style must be flexible to change. Understand the aim of conducting a town hall and evaluate its success later on. 

With these tips, you can improve your virtual town hall meetings and evolve your strategy with time.