Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week’s question comes from a Head of Internal Comms in the Netherlands who asks:

What I like about this question is your ability to recognise that what you’ve tried so far isn’t working and your desire to try something new to improve things. There’s no ego in your work, fair play to you.

And you know what, townhalls are tricky. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, townhalls are tricky. You can get the purpose right, you can get the agenda right, you can do all the hard thinking about what this event is even for and align it to your audience needs. You can do everything right.

But all it takes to derail the event and waste all your hard work is a leader to talk at the event in a way that no one understands, or in a tone that isn’t received well, and the event is a disaster.

Let’s talk about how you can play a role in helping leaders prepare for townhalls better, without giving them a script or a set of key messages to rattle off.

Let’s look at a masterclass of how it’s done

Let me show you what good looks like. We’ve just had a live session in The Curious Tribe on this topic where we were joined by Lauren Patton, Director of Internal Comms at Appspace. Appspace is a remote-first tech company with 450 employees across multiple time zones, so a townhall needs to be well planned and speakers need to be well prepped.

Lauren's townhalls are rated super highly by employees. People show up live, they stay for the whole event, they engage with the content and they often say how authentic and transparent the updates are. How does Lauren achieve this?

She gave us a candid, unvarnished look at how she plans her townhalls and how she works with leaders to get them ready.

Lauren is outrageously impressive, everything she said in this event was so thoughtful and helpful and practical. I’ll give you three of her tips here and you can try them for yourself.

Insight 1: Don’t write key messages, provide key questions instead

We all know what it’s like to invest time and effort into writing key messages for a leader only for them to be discarded and ignored. It’s annoying, it’s frustrating, and then somehow we still get the blame when the townhall doesn’t land well with employees!

Lauren suggests a different approach instead. Don’t write a script for your leaders, don’t write them a set of key messages. Give them this magic formula:

• 3 key questions + a time limit

So instead of helping your leader prepare with a set of key messages, instead you’re going to simply say “Hey you’ve got 7 minutes for your slot at the townhall. In those 7 minutes, you need to answer these 3 questions”.

Your leader doesn’t need key messages. They are already the expert in the subject they’re talking about. What they do need is a frame or a set of guardrails to speak in, and that’s why giving them 3 questions to answer is so great. Once they answer those questions, their job is done.

Lauren has prep calls with leaders before the townhall, she asks questions and listens and then creates a short summary document for them based on their conversation. She helps them to see that yes you could talk about every single detail of Project X, but really what people need to know is A, B and C so let’s just focus on that. Lauren will draft the key questions based on this discussion and this makes it much easier for the leader to stick to the key points without trying to rattle off a pre-written script or remember exactly what they are supposed to say.

Great approach, isn’t it? I told you Lauren was impressive.

Insight 2: Negotiate as part of the planning process

Another way Lauren works with leaders to make her townhalls successful is by using negotiation as a key part of her planning process.

For example, she will draft a suggested agenda for the next townhall and bring it to her leaders for discussion and negotiation. She bases it on what employees are asking about and what her understanding is of what’s happening in the business. But this isn’t a finished agenda. She’s not presenting it to get immediate agreement. She’s opening the door for negotiation:

• What’s missing from this agenda that needs to be included?
• If we’re adding in X, what are we removing?
• What’s more of a priority for this month, A or B?

This is a smart approach to getting a solid agenda that everyone agrees on and that aligns with business priorities.

And her negotiating approach is a recurring theme in how she gets the townhall ready. The content is negotiated: what’s going to be talked about this month, what would be better pushed to next month, why X instead of Y?

The time is negotiated. She puts recommended time slots into the agenda, so when leadership says this person needs ten minutes rather than five, the question back isn’t no. It’s fine, then who’s losing five minutes? The trade-off does the work instead of her.

This negotiation approach is really good because you don’t need to spend energy getting buy-in or approval for your plan. You’ve co-created the plans with leaders so their agreement is already there.

Insight 3: Gather feedback after every townhall and use it for the next one

After every single townhall, Lauren sends a short anonymous survey to employees. She gathers feedback on the content, the speakers, if the event was useful. And she always asks people a simple but powerful question: what topics they want to hear about at the next townhall meeting.

She can use this data in multiple ways. Firstly, she now has feedback from employees on what they thought about speakers; were they engaging, did they present information in a way that was easy to understand, were they being transparent?

This gives her a way to coach leaders to improve based on what the audience is telling her. And having this kind of data makes it much easier to suggest to a leader that they could improve their speaking skills or they could make their slides less complex… because it’s not just YOUR opinion, it’s the feedback from the audience. It makes it harder to argue against.

And Lauren can also use all the feedback and ideas in the survey to build out the suggested agenda for the next townhall. For example, if lots of survey respondents are saying they really want to hear an update on the change programme or on the planned return-to-office, then it makes sense to include that in the next townhall as it’s clearly an item of interest.

Sending out a pulse survey like this is a smart, simple way to keep finding ways to improve your townhall and give you specific tips on what you need to coach your leaders on.

Want to learn more?

What I’ve shared here is just the tip of the iceberg of what Lauren shared in this event about how she makes her townhalls so hugely successful. The full session is recorded and available in The Curious Tribe video library, exclusively to members.

In the recording you’ll also learn:

• How she handles time management and stops the agenda running late
• How she runs the employee Q&A with two routes for employees to ask questions
• How to get people to attend live by making it an event you don’t want to miss
• How to involve employees by alternating hosts for each townhall
• How she tracks the townhall scores over time to drive constant improvement
• How she coaches speakers to communicate in plain English with no jargon

Bonus: You can also download the exact templates Lauren uses:

• The townhall prep template that she sends to every speaker 2 days before the event
• The townhall pulse survey template including all the questions she asks employees at the end of each townhall

You can download both in The Curious Tribe today.

This is exactly the kind of practical, been-there advice that’s hard to find anywhere else. And this is what we share in The Curious Tribe.

The Curious Tribe is my community for internal comms pros who want to have a great career, make an impact at work and enjoy themselves at the same time. With an NPS of +81 and 85% of members renewing for a second year or more, this is easily the best thing I’ve built in my career.

If you work in internal comms, The Curious Tribe was built for you.

Are you the next member of The Curious Tribe? 👀

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

PS You can connect with Lauren on LinkedIn here - she is brilliant, go follow her, you'll learn a lot.

Find me on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and check out my book​

Want to work together?

• Join The Curious Tribe. This is my membership community for ambitious, curious communicators who want to achieve more in their roles and have fun at the same time. Membership allows you to work directly with me for 12 months, make deep connections with other communication pros who 'get it' and improve your skills through training and learning. More info here.
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This newsletter is not written with AI. It's a joy to write this with my human brain every week. I love writing it and I hope you enjoy reading it.

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