Inside CVS Health’s strategy for engaging town halls

After years of tinkering with town hall formats, CVS Health’s comms team had an idea — what if a town hall was just all questions from employees? After all, employee questions had provided some of the best town hall moments over the years. By having the CEO answer questions in real time, communicators could test what happened when employee concerns drove the event rather than a predetermined agenda.

“We decided that we wanted to elevate the experience and make them more fun, more entertaining, diversify the voices, do something more than just give PowerPoint presentations,” said Kyle Pearson, associate vice president of colleague communications at CVS Health. “We wanted to create more of an experience that colleagues got excited for.”

The comms team began mixing formats and speakers throughout town hall events, bringing employee stories, recognition, video, and participation into events that had long been places for leaders to talk in a one-way format.

“Usually the content isn’t the issue; it’s about how the content is presented,” Sabrina Kemper, senior manager of colleague communications at CVS Health, said. “We really focus on the storytelling aspects of things. Multimedia, colleague voices — our people love to hear from themselves.”

During Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference at Microsoft in Seattle this October 13-15, Pearson and Kemper will discuss how communicators can build more engaging town halls and use video to extend their best moments across internal channels after the event ends.

Use employee questions to prepare leaders for town halls, but don’t over script

Before deciding what belongs on stage in a given town hall meeting, CVS Health’s comms team looks for evidence of what’s on employees’ minds. Kemper told Ragan that comments on Heartbeat, the company’s intranet platform, offer a source of insight. She added that pre-submitted questions for town hall meetings provide another, more direct view of issues employees want leadership to address.

“We can get anywhere from 230 to 13 questions, depending on the time of year,” Kemper said. “But no matter how many questions we get, those questions are a great foundational point of what our leaders need to be prepared to speak to.”

Kemper went on to say that the comms team then organizes the themes that emerge and determines which leaders are best positioned to address them. This gives executives context without trying to engineer every answer, which is an important distinction when employees are looking for authenticity.

“There’s no way we could have prepped the CEO for every single question that colleagues asked,” Kemper said, referring to the all-Q&A town hall. “But it was just such a great point for them to see a leader that they could trust to address all of their concerns.”

Give town hall video a life beyond the meeting

At CVS Health, town halls are seen as a great place to share information with employees for the first time. But the messages shared there can find life on other platforms outside the confines of the meeting.

When the company rolled out four new values at the end of 2025, the comms team profiled four employees who embodied them. They were:

• We care.
• We innovate with purpose.
• We are accountable.
• We prioritize safety and quality.

However, Pearson told Ragan that when the videos were being made, communicators didn’t tell interviewees which value they were being interviewed about or that they’d be featured in a town hall. Their videos premiered during a town hall before the four employees were brought onstage and recognized, with colleagues across the country watching remotely.

“We often ask ourselves, ‘How do we extend the life of what we use at the town halls into other channels?’” Pearson said. “It’s an investment of time and resources and money. We think of town halls as these tentpole moments where we can do something big.”

For the values rollout, CVS Health continued to use the employee videos after the event and dedicated subsequent town halls to highlighting one value at a time.

“We used those videos after the town hall to reinforce what our values are and how they show up for our colleagues,” Pearson said. “We really try to make these the big moments and then have a lot of follow-on activity to create a long tail so colleagues continue to feel the things that they felt at the town hall. It begins with the town hall. That’s sort of like the big firework explosion, and then all of the good feelings follow after.”

To register for Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference, click here.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.