3 ways M&T Bank creates more space for employee questions at town halls

When town halls wrap up, there are often more employee questions than time allows. At M&T Bank, the goal isn’t necessarily to answer every question in the room. It’s to give employees a meaningful opportunity to raise what’s on their minds and help leaders understand what matters most.

Russell Evans, head of communications for Commercial Banking at M&T Bank, sees the questions employees bring to those meetings as a useful test of what the meeting is really for.

“When you talk about employee questions, whether they’re unanswered or live, what you’re really talking about is whether you see town halls as mostly one-way communication or two-way communication,” Evans told Ragan. “Many organizations would see them as one-way. They wouldn’t necessarily say that, but they approach them as the organization telling you what you need to know.”

Here are three ways you M&T Bank approaches town hall questions that don’t get addressed during the meetings themselves, and how you too can mine these valuable queries for insights.

1. Prioritize the questions employees care about most

You probably won’t get to answer every question, but you can use employee input to help prioritize them. Evans said a lot of organizations treat Q&A as a nice-to-have, something they’ll get to if there’s time. At M&T, Q&A has a dedicated place on the agenda.

“If you’re not able to get to every question, you can leverage technology to help you address the most important ones, because you gave employees the opportunity to upvote the questions they care about most,” Evans said. “You’re also devoting a committed amount of time, and it’s a substantial amount of time. For us, it’s 10 to 15 minutes of an hour-long meeting. That gives us a better opportunity to focus the conversation on what employees want to hear about.”

2. Create space for employees to help one another

M&T’s Q&A tool also gives employees the opportunity to respond to one another, which can be particularly useful for operational or practical questions.

“This platform also allows employees to answer each other’s questions,” Evans told Ragan. “Sometimes the question will be more of an operational question, like, ‘Where do I submit that request?’ or ‘What is my last day to fill out the engagement survey?’ When employees answer each other’s questions, that truly feels like magic. You get that crowdsourcing of information inside the meeting, but it can also happen after the meeting ends.”

3. Keep your leftovers on the burner

Leftover questions can feel like a to-do list. But M&T’s best read on what to cover next comes from a post-event survey asking employees what they want to hear about. The questions still help once the meeting’s over:

• Pull every submitted question into one list and see what keeps coming up.
• Bring those topics into planning for the next town hall.

“We’ve absolutely received content ideas from the kinds of questions that we get,” Evans said. “I wouldn’t say they come from the unanswered questions because it’s all the questions that are submitted, and you can see patterns. In some cases, it’s, ‘We need to tell employees more about this project.’ In other cases, it’s not that you haven’t covered a particular topic; it’s that the topic is employees’ top priority or pain point. Whether you’ve spoken about it or not, you should continue to focus on the things that matter most to your employee base.”

If your town halls keep leaving a pile of questions behind, the fix might be bigger than the Q&A. Evans’ advice for getting the most out of a town hall starts from scratch.

“Take a zero-based approach to your town hall,” he said. “Assume it doesn’t exist, then spend time brainstorming with leadership: Why should we have one? What should employees get from it? And how will we know if it’s working? Build from those answers instead of inheriting a format just because it’s what you’ve always done.”

Sean Devlin is the senior internal communications editor at Ragan. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.