Master your Facilitation Skills

Giving your employees a chance to ask questions in a Q&A session should be one of the core elements of your all-hands meetings. It’s a priceless opportunity to learn what your employees think as well as address the most burning issues. But – running a Q&A session can be a real challenge too. How do you encourage employees to ask questions in the first place? How do you prevent the Q&A session from becoming toxic or negative? In this article, we’ll share 9 tips that will help you handle your entire all-hands meeting Q&A with grace, ensure that important questions get addressed, and leave everyone satisfied. 1. Leave enough time for Q&A For a Q&A session to hit its mark, it cannot feel rushed. Your employees must have enough time to think about and ask their questions. At the same time, they have to feel that their questions are answered properly, not hurriedly. A rushed Q&A session may even backfire – your employees may feel as though leaders don’t care about their questions and concern

For any meeting setting, the Q&A is often the most valuable part. That’s what our team members say, too. But there’s a problem many people face: limited time. So what do you do if you end up with some unanswered questions at the end of your meeting? Our advice: don’t ignore them. If you wave people’s concerns off, they will feel like their voice doesn’t matter. Instead, show people that you care. Address the unanswered questions afterward. It will help you ensure that important issues don’t slip through the cracks. To help you handle it, here are 8 ways to address outstanding questions after your big meeting. 1. Address unanswered questions on Slack The most useful place to share the answers is where you communicate as a team. And for many companies, this place is Slack. So it only makes sense to publish the answers there. One of our customers, a leading games publisher, shared how they use Slack to handle unanswered questions from their all-hands meetings. Their executives commit to a

Opening up to employee questions has never been more important than it is today. In these tough times, hosting transparent Q&A sessions and giving people a chance to ask is a key channel for the leaders to build trust and open culture. To start a conversation with their employees, many companies use Slido to crowdsource questions from their teams. However, the power to speak up might tempt people to ask questions that hint a sense of frustration or hostility. Or, ask a question that is irrelevant for the discussion. To help you handle such situations, here are 5 Slido tips that will reduce the number of poisonous or irrelevant questions during your company Q&A. 1. Set clear guidelines and expectations Prevention is better than cure. Setting clear, simple guidelines can drastically improve the quality of your employees’ questions. Clarify the expectations and rules for submitting questions before each of your Q&A session. “You can’t put the tool out there and expect everyone to use it t

For many companies around the world, running virtual meetings is the only way to manage cross-team communication. But there are multiple challenges that come with attending meetings online. Remote workers often tend to zone out or feel excluded from the conversation unless they’re compelled to actively participate. As a company that runs hybrid meetings all the time, we know a thing or two about it. There is, however, a number of ways to make sure that doesn’t happen and secure the best experience for your remote teammates. Let us run you through some of the best tools and facilitation techniques that work for us at Slido. We believe they will help make your virtual meetings better and more valuable for your remote colleagues. 1. Double-check the AV setup First, you have to make sure the tech doesn’t fail you. So before you kick off your meeting, make sure everything works like a well-oiled machine. Pick a quality live streaming tool If you’re running virtual meetings or hybrid meeting

What do we mean when we talk about inclusive meetings? The term itself doesn’t describe any new phenomenon; rather, meetings as they should be. Inclusive meetings are meetings where each employee has a voice and feels empowered to actively contribute. Running inclusive meetings means you open the door to a diversity of thought and enable all your team members to bring the best ideas to the table – regardless of their personality, role, or work setup. Pick up a few of these handy practices, adopt them throughout your meetings, and start hosting more inclusive meetings for all. Preparation phase Don’t underestimate the prep phase. It’ll set the tone for your upcoming meeting (and beyond). Here are a few tips on how to be inclusive of all your teammates before your meeting even starts. 1. Invite everyone who might benefit from the meeting As much as 67% of employees say that spending too much time in meetings distracts them from being productive at work, as this study found. On the other

Giving your team a voice is one of the main reasons why a regular all-hands meeting should be run. Still, for many employees, it is just another meeting to sit through. So, how do you organize an all-hands meeting that your team members will actually look forward to? We have put together for you this easily digestible, easy-to-read guide, that collects 25 actionable tips on how to organize more engaging all-hands meetings in your company. 👉 Download the guide as a PDF here They’re all tried and tested, either by us or by leaders in the industry. Here are the topics you will find in the guide: 1. Boosting engagement in the room An all-hands meeting is a space where your employees have the chance to express themselves and have a direct, face-to-face conversation with their leaders. For this to happen, it has to provide them with enough opportunities for engagement and personal interaction. The first chapter of this guidebook contains a handful of simple tricks on how to engage and energ