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March 24, 2009

Terrible town halls?

If you think I was being over-dramatic in my recent Conference Board Review article (the tale of the CEO and the town hall meeting), think again. Just last week a client visited our offices, asking for advice on a variety of issues, including the CEO town halls she was recently put in charge of.

The client opened a folder and pulled out a printout of a PowerPoint deck. “This is what the CEO has been doing,” she said, straining as she lifted the thick stack and plunked it on the desk.

It was a car-wreck moment for me: I didn’t want to look, but I had to. And the reality was worse than I feared: There were 55—count ‘em—slides. (And they weren’t visual; these slides were chock-full of charts, graphs and data.)

“How long are your town hall meetings?” I asked the client.

“An hour,” she replied.

“Any time for questions and answers?”

“Just a few minutes,” she said. “But nobody asks any questions, anyway.”

That wasn’t surprising. After 50 minutes of this dizzying array of information, employees were brain-dead. The problem wasn’t just the quantity of slides; it was the way the meeting was organized. Nine separate topics were covered. Large quantities of data were reported. There was no story, just thousands of facts.

Worst of all, none of it was directly relevant to employees. There was no way for them to get involved, no call to action, no opportunity to do anything but passively sitting in the audience, waiting for it to be over.

We gave our client lots of advice on how she could stop this madness. If you need some, too, you might consider signing up for two low-cost web workshops coming up: Making Meetings Matter on April 29 and Engage Employees with Virtual Town Halls on June 10.

Hope to see you there.

Posted by Alison Davis at March 24, 2009 03:07 PM