The Town Hall Meeting Template in SoWork is a simple path to an impactful and productive team meeting. Town hall meetings are large-scale, involving the whole company, and often get called an all hands meeting.

Although these terms are used interchangeably, they have different meanings. A town hall meeting is more question and answer based, paired with open discussion, while all hands meetings focus on conveying a message and making a key presentation.

Town hall meetings help foster open communication and celebration within your team. They’re a great way to stay up to date on your organization’s goals, celebrate wins, and ask questions about company happenings. In SoWork, town halls empower and engage teammates, leaving them feeling informed and excited about the work they’re doing and the goals they’re striving toward.

3 Benefits of Using the Town Hall Meeting Template

1️⃣ Meeting Summaries via Sophia Bot, SoWork’s generative AI Office Assistant

With this Town Hall Meeting Template, you’re able to use SoWork’s AI generated Meeting Summaries (created by Sophia Bot). This Smart Office tool allows you to get the most out of your meeting by providing clear, section-by-section summaries and tidy action items. With SoWork’s Sophia Bot, you have your next priorities lined up right away, saving you time and energy.

When the meeting begins, click the Sophia Bot icon under your video tile - you’ll then see Sophia Bot begin typing. From here, your meeting content is being transcribed and summarized automatically, and a note with your Meeting Summary will be available to you and your team within minutes of leaving the meeting.

You can access these notes at any point afterwards as they’ll be stored within your personal Meeting Summaries Codex on the SoWork app.

2️⃣ Feeling like you’re really together

With the SoWork Town Hall Meeting Template, you’re able to collect early and linger around afterwards, because you’re in a virtual office! Your team can literally see that your design teammate is coming out of a deep work period and heading over to the meeting area, or that your engineering teammate is running behind from their last meeting.

This buzzing office energy fosters deeper connections, spontaneous conversations, and ideation that drives innovation, and just isn’t possible on a scheduled Zoom or Teams call.

By using SoWork, your team will truly feel like you’re sitting beside each other in a real office. You’re able to sit beside your favourite co-worker and grab people on the way out the door when the meeting ends. This feeling of togetherness is key for distributed and remote teams, helping your team feel aligned and ready to crush some work!

3️⃣ Celebrating your team’s accomplishments and maintaining alignment

Teams often begin town hall meetings with celebrating wins or sharing good news. This helps start the meeting with positive energy and helps it flow throughout the rest of the session. At SoWork, we typically share a milestone celebration, a launch of a new feature or initiative, cheerful feedback from a customer, or shout out a team’s amazing work.

Using SoWork’s Town Hall template, your team can blast emojis (and even a teammate’s avatar), to celebrate progress. Calling out your organization’s successes and learnings are useful ways to elevate happenings within the company.

A Q&A section in a town hall meeting is instrumental for company alignment, and is usually a great way to end the session. When company founders lead the Q&A, it provides an opportunity for folks to have their burning questions answered and feel more aligned to the broader organization.

These questions could be about anything on their mind or something that was covered earlier in the town hall.

How to Use the Town Hall Meeting Template

After clicking on the “Try Template” button, we’ll guide you through a quick onboarding flow, where we’ll make a virtual office. Your meeting template will be inside this office, and after onboarding, you’ll land in your template - ready to try it out with your team!

At SoWork, because we work beside each other in a virtual office, we’re able to see when people start gathering around before the meeting begins. So, when others in the office see their teammates collecting in the meeting area a few minutes early, they know they’re welcome to walk over and catch up.

Or, maybe they want to quickly grab their supervisor and ask them a question before the meeting. When the town hall meeting begins, we follow our pre-established agenda, while giving time for extra context and answering questions wherever needed.

SoWork’s multitude of meeting related features make hosting meetings engaging and productive. You’re able to blast emojis - and even a teammate’s avatar - to celebrate progress, raise your avatar’s hand when you have a question (and lower it again when it’s been answered), screenshare multiple screens, use whiteboards together and so much more.

You can also customize your Meeting Zone by adding relevant images and documents for your team to view before, after, or during your town hall meeting.

FAQs

✨ How do I get the most out of town hall and what’s the best way to prep?

To effectively prepare for your team’s town hall, first decide on your meeting cadence, and ensure the meeting purpose and expectations are clear. The cadence of a town hall can vary, so it’s best to choose what makes the most sense for your team.

You can also get the most out of your town hall by preparing an agenda beforehand. This way, you know exactly what you’re covering, in which order, and roughly how long you’d like each section to take. Most teams start with celebrations/shoutouts, then move on to announcements, any presentations they’d like to show, and then ending with a question and answer period.

Teams generally keep their announcements section short and sweet, but can open up for questions and discussion after this period as well if needed. Presentations can be as long or as short as you’d like them to be, though most teams keep them succinct. These are a lovely way to show teammates recognition and highlight their impactful work.

The Q&A period can vary as well, and some teams have their questions written down beforehand, while some other teams prefer to just let this part flow. At SoWork, we provide a platform for teammates to submit their questions to before the town hall, while also allowing plenty of time for questions and meaningful conversations that arise as the meeting goes on.

This not only creates a designated time to address questions, but it also ensures no questions fall through the cracks.

Ensure teammates know that they can ask questions and raise any concerns whenever they’d like, and that you’d be happy to create an open dialogue around the many topics. This open conversation and feedback often sparks great ideas and can help create improvements in areas that need a boost.

✨ What do I do after my town hall meeting?

Encourage teammates to ask any questions that come up afterwards, and because the town hall took place in SoWork, you can grab a teammate and ask a quick question, or let them know you were inspired by something raised and want to get going on it. Town hall meetings are extremely beneficial for facilitating cross-team collaboration.

After the meeting, you can also review the action items Sophia Bot generated for you, and organize any of your related tasks or work blocks. Perhaps you need to be unblocked by a colleague to complete an action item? Just walk over to your teammate - no meeting links or calendar invites required.

With your town hall meeting in a virtual office, a quick sync with your coworker is just steps away.