A look inside Amazon’s town hall strategy

Town hall meetings are a great way to get internal comms information across to a large group of employees. However, you can’t just schedule a meeting and hope for the best — effective town halls take planning and tinkering on the part of internal communicators to succeed. The best ones can serve as a cultural unifier and a way to give leadership visibility to the employee base.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference from October 14-16 in Seattle, Hilary Sparrow, employee engagement and internal communications leader at Amazon, will share her perspectives on how town halls figure into an internal comms strategy and the steps her team has taken to optimize them at Amazon.

“The town hall continues to be a really important mechanism for internal communications at any business,” Sparrow told Ragan. “As I’ve moved from company to company, the cadence, length and style of these meetings have varied widely. I’ve seen things that really work well and things that don’t, and my goal is always to identify what drives engagement rather than what just fills time.”

Crafting the perfect town hall

Putting together an effective town hall requires a lot more than just sending an email invite and expecting people to show up. Building engagement begins with a deep understanding of what your colleagues will and won’t show up for and molding their look to what your employees want.

“At Amazon, coming out of COVID, it was a slow ramp to get people re-engaged with in-person experiences,” Sparrow said. “One of the first things I did was to move from annual town halls to quarterly ones, and to shorten them from two hours to one. My mindset was less is more, and I aimed to run it like a morning talk show — keep the content tight and keep the energy high.”

She added that one of the major obstacles her team faced when overhauling town halls at Amazon was cultivating a culture that emphasized in-person gatherings.

“When I inherited the role, the culture was that people simply didn’t attend in-person events,” Sparrow said. “I had to break that pattern. I used what I call the influencer model by working with executives to encourage their teams to show up. I even wrote reminders on whiteboards in the elevators and personally rode them to spread the word. Sometimes grassroots tactics are what it takes to shift a culture.”

Like many large international companies, Amazon faces challenges in bringing together global teams in a town hall format — different time zones make it difficult. Sparrow said that tech helped bridge geographic gulfs and get people on the same page.

“For our India teams, we scheduled a separate viewing party with the on-demand link followed by a live Q&A session with leaders,” Sparrow said. “It gave those employees access to leadership in a meaningful way, which is critical.”

Sparrow also said that her team accounts for people who might not be available at the time the town hall takes place and want to catch up on things later.

“Timeliness is everything,” she said. “I always aim to release the recording within 24 hours while the event is still fresh. That way, if people are talking about it, they can immediately access the content, catch up and feel included in the conversation.”

Sparrow said that visuals in town hall meetings help keep employees engaged, mentioning that her team works to feature pictures from its global locations to give a sense of cultural unity during the event. When employees see themselves in internal communications, they’re more likely to engage.

“Amazon is not a slide culture, but I believe in beautiful, clear slides that distill the message,” she said. “I also integrate video and imagery from across our global teams to create community and energy. These visual elements are essential to keeping a large, diverse audience engaged.”

Town halls that serve the employees

For Sparrow and her team, the top-line goal of their reimagining of town halls was to ensure that employees had important information amid their sometimes-chaotic schedules.

“I always come at it with the lens of figuring out what’s in it for the employee,” Sparrow said. “These are incredibly busy people with hard jobs. If they’re going to give me 30 minutes or an hour, I need to make sure they walk away with something valuable — whether that’s an insight, connection or simply the feeling of being in the loop.”

Sparrow added that her team’s ultimate measure of success isn’t whether or not every employee is engaged with every moment of Amazon’s town halls — it’s about them getting something out of the meetings. The comms team created a content push to ensure that Amazon’s employees always get what’s talked about in town hall meetings, even if it’s in short snippets.

“For me, it’s not about whether someone watches the entire town hall,” she told Ragan. “It’s about whether they can get the gist quickly. Our highlight emails include images, headlines and one-sentence summaries. If someone spends just 10 to 30 seconds skimming and walks away with the essentials, that’s a win for internal comms.”

Register for Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference here.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time, he enjoys watching Philadelphia sports.