How Amazon reengineered its town halls

Town hall meetings are a go-to for communicators to share vital information about the organization with a large number of employees at once. But without the right kinds of programming and planning, they can become stale and risk losing employee engagement.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference this past October, Hilary Sparrow, employee engagement and internal communications lead at Amazon, shared her insights on how her team overhauled town halls, turning them from standard company meetings into much more engaging events.

Sparrow told the audience that one of the first steps she took was to take long meetings and make them shorter and more frequent to keep people’s attention.

“Our town halls were happening once or maybe twice a year, and they were two hours long and online only,” she said. “I increased the cadence to quarterly, cut the time to just an hour and shifted from deep dives to quick, high-energy segments.”

She added that for town halls to work in an age in which communication is often instant, they need to cater to those kinds of audience mindsets.

Science tells us our attention span is about 20 minutes, so you have to design for that,” Sparrow said. “If you’re going to ask for someone’s time, meet them where they are — not where you wish their focus was.”

For Sparrow, taking on the mindset of a television producer helped her get in the right mindset for the town hall overhaul — that meant changing up segments and voices within the meetings to avoid the format getting stale.

“Produce it like a show, because you are running a show,” she said. “And if you think of it as a million-dollar production, you’ll plan it like one. You wouldn’t air a live TV broadcast without rehearsals, pacing, transitions and good visuals — so why would you do that for your employees?”

Sparrow also shared an anecdote about how illustrating an organization’s work in action during a town hall helped the message click with employees.

“We brought one of our small business sellers to share their story,” she said. “They sell pet crates on Amazon, and with their earnings, they also run a nonprofit that fosters dogs in their community. Suddenly, employees could see it — their work was helping save dogs. That’s when it clicks. It’s not just metrics and dashboards; it’s real people whose lives are changed because of what you do.”

She also reminded communicators that while the structure of the meetings did make a difference, that wasn’t the only factor at play.

“It’s not about the format,” Sparrow told the audience. “It’s not about the slides. It’s about giving people a reason to believe their time is well spent. If they walk away informed, inspired or just reminded that they matter — that’s a win for any communicator.”

To watch Sparrow’s presentation in its entirety, visit Ragan Training.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.