Optimize Leadership Q&A In Town Halls To Engage And Build Employee Trust
By Justin Joffe for CommPRO
In last fall’s Ragan and HarrisX survey, communications leaders and CEOs both rated employee communications as the top way to bring value to their organizations — but comms leaders also said it’s the top function their org needed to improve on.
While there are many forums and touchpoints for directly reaching your employees, none have the potential to engage them quite like a town hall meeting. Since many town halls went virtual in 2020, savvy comms leads have monitored employee engagement around these events to figure out what messages, cadence, formats and overall approaches resonate best with their workforces.
Among the various elements that make up a successful town hall, Q&A time with your leaders is crucial but often under-considered. These forums provide employees with direct access to executives and, when done right, build trust by connecting your leadership’s personality and answers back to the organization’s culture and goals. Q&As are a time to get out in front of concerns, revealing qualitative insights on prevailing employee sentiment while humanizing business decisions through your leaders’ experiences.
We spoke with Valerie Di Maria, principal at the 10 company, to learn more about how leadership Q&A can be optimized during town halls to build trust and engage employees in a true dialogue.
Making time to foster dialogue
Knowing your audience when going into a town hall means knowing what’s really on your employees’ minds. That requires looking at the last post-event town hall survey to learn what worked and what didn’t, then knowing what you want them to understand through that lens. The best way to do this is to use Q&A as an opportunity to foster a dialogue with your employees.
“This is the biggest issue we have with a lot of our clients, said Di Maria. “They say they want questions, but are concerned they won’t have answers or they are more focused on their messages rather than two-way communications, so they never leave enough time for questions.”
Suffice to say, making Q&A an afterthought by squeezing in five minutes at the end isn’t the best way to engage employees. That’s why Di Maria recommends building in time by scheduling at least one run-through and timing it. “If you’re planning a 45-minute conversation with Q&A and everybody’s speaking roles time out to 43 minutes, you’ve got a problem,” she said.
Instead, consider interspersing the Q&A or discussion throughout each speaker segment for at least two or three questions in addition to leaving time for Q&A at the end.
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