Search Results (internal)

Each town hall is a high-stakes opportunity to bridge leaders to employees—or create disconnection.

During Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville last month, Cisco Networking Internal Communications Lead Raquel Cool shared how she’s led internal comms for the company in the three years since she joined—and made innovating town halls a focus.

Among the nearly 100 employee-facing events that Cool has produced, she’s found common threads to communicate relevant information. They are:

1. Showing an energetic and united leadership team. “This is the only forum where employees have direct access with CEO and C suite leaders,” she said, “and so it’s a really important forum for them to feel connected and have their questions answered.”
2. Delivering relevant updates from leaders on the business. This should include addressing top-of-mind topics to employees, which you can solicit beforehand.
3. Celebrating progress, innovation and the teams that make them happen.
4. Drawing strong connections between day-to-day employee efforts and the larger company strategy.
5. Setting the tone for your company while building culture and community

Cool then outlined her focus areas for ensuring these things happen.:

• Relevance forms the foundation of trust and connection by ensuring content is meaningful and will resonate with employees.
• Consistency involves essential practices to keep leaders informed, and emplyees engaged, throughout the process.
• Creativity aims to move beyond dry town halls and infuse dynamic elements that make them more engaging.

Here’s how she put this focus into action.

Reinforcing relevance

Cool says that communicators who ignore data do so at their peril.

“We all know that the hard sell isn’t the importance of data,” she said. “The hard sell is how many minutes we have in a day. The hard sell is how many resources we have to allocate to understand data, and the hard sell is really our time.”

One colleague likened constantly moving from one deliverable to the next  to sipping from a firehose. This makes it hard to pause, measure and reflect.

“But I would love to make a case for building data and employee listening into your communications practice, said Cool. “And I say this because data is foundational to relevance. When I’m thinking through the upcoming show flow for an event, I want to be at the intersection between what employees care about and leadership strategic priorities. If those are two circles that aren’t touching, then your content is probably not going to land.”

Communicating with consistency

With different leaders popping up at different town halls, Cool provides them with an executive brief that encourages consistency.

“The executive brief is my starting point for every town hall,” she explained Cool. “I use it throughout the process, from ideating the agenda to moving it through review, to prepping executives and teams on the show flow.”

While some elements like wardrobe guidelines are self-explanatory, Cool called out the distinction between session and segment goals specifically.

“As you’re thinking about why you’re doing any given segment, it helps to call out what the segment is for,” she said. “We name overarching meeting goals, but it helps to get specific on the value each segment brings. Are we building culture? Are we supporting transformation? Answering top questions? Informing people of the latest business updates?”

ool also explained the importance of listing the leaders available to help town hall moderators run a successful live Q&A. This is often the most important aspect of meetings, as it’s one of the only forums where people have direct access to leaders. Cool estimated that Cisco’s town halls are typically half programmed content and half Q&A or Ask Me Anything.

“The goal is to answer as many questions as possible as transparently as possible while prioritizing the trending questions at the top,” she said. “Say five people asked the same question… put it at the top.”

Here’s her process:

1. Collect questions in advance and put them in a shared document.
2. Prep executives and contextualize the brief.
3. Define Q&A roles.

The producer sets up a backchannel while the Q&A moderator verbalizes questions. Speakers provide text-based replies and on-camera answers, while a Q&A monitor recommends questions to answer. The chat moderator engages employees in the online chat and microphone runner(s) do just that at in-person events.

Cultivating creativity

Keeping segments tight and providing this executive brief leaves room for audience engagement alongside dynamic content. At Cisco, those include:

• Putting the spotlight on employees. Explaining Cisco’s internal Pinnacle Awards, Cool remembered wanting to drive applications during a Bangalore town hall in a fresh way. The solution was to invite a leader who was already visiting to interview past winners, three different people on three different teams, who answered two questions each.
• Open your meeting with a video. Rather than go straight to the first speaker, this provides atmosphere and eases people in. For those without budget, Cool recommends a title slide and PowerPoint with welcoming language and embedded music. You can also invest in an evergreen video that is reusable across town halls, onboarding, trainings and more.
• Lightning rounds. Consider putting a countdown clock in one corner of the screen and having leaders explain focus areas of the business in three minutes or less. This is a fun way to gamify engagement when you’re tight on time.

Check out Cool’s full presentation here: