Ask HN: Does your company do All Hands meetings?
And if so, is it formal or informal? Are presentations vetted? Does it feel like a conversation or a webinar?
Then I ended up getting laid off abruptly, or so, I thought. Most people seemed to get blindsided by it, but a few people I spoke to who were heavily involved in the all-hands said that while nothing explicitly looked bad, there had been some ominous signs in the past few.
The explicit reason we were given for the layoff was simply that the new product we were all hired to help develop/support just wasn’t getting as much adoption as the execs had hoped and the company wanted to refocus on historically and immediately profitable products and services instead. Meaning laying off most everyone they had hired in the past couple years. Everyone on my team got axed except for the manager, who was told he was basically going to have to do all of our work now (small company, not quite a startup, but liked to think it was). There were some branding/marketing/org changes in the prior months that didn’t really hurt anyone, but would have been at least a bit suspicious to see if everything was going great.
In other companies they were doing the All Hands on normal office hours. I usually like it because I can listen (camera off) without participating, so, maybe I can do it from the sofa, or while eating something in the kitchen.
We make it optional, limit it to 60 minutes with about 20 minutes of Q&A questions are submitted in advance or live via an form. All information is presented the next day in written form. About a third of the people love it, a third hate it and the rest are meh.
We get alot of value out of the questions. We know who asks them, but don’t disclose. Stupid or inappropriate questions are silently dropped. None of the panelists know about the dropped questions or identity, the person who handles doesn’t record it.
The rest depends on the month. Sometimes we recognize a team, so a science project presentation Or recognize individuals. Usually there’s a what’s up deck. During COVID, we did them bi-weekly, but now have a monthly cadence.