The all-hands attention problem

All-hands meetings have an attention problem that better slides don't fix. The format inherited from in-person town halls — leadership speaks, company speaks, teams speak, Q&A at the end — doesn't work when attendance is optional and cameras are off. People stay engaged when the content is relevant to them. The standard running order buries the most audience-relevant content in the middle and puts Q&A at the end where it always gets squeezed.

The thesis here is simple: sequence the agenda by audience relevance, not by organizational hierarchy. The things that most affect how people work go first. Leadership updates go where they naturally fit, not at the top because rank demands it.

The agenda (copy-paste this)

Duration: 45–60 minutes
Format: Video call or hybrid; Q&A facilitated by someone other than the presenter

Section 1 — Opening and context (5 min)

One paragraph: what's the state of the company right now, in plain language
Don't start with last quarter's numbers; start with the situation that makes this all-hands necessary
If there's nothing urgent, say so — "we're sharing updates" is an honest opening

Section 2 — What's changing for you (10 min)

Process changes, team structure changes, tooling changes, policy updates
Anything that changes how individuals do their day-to-day work
This is the highest-relevance content; lead with it
Be specific about dates and who it affects

Section 3 — Company and strategy updates (15 min)

Revenue, growth, or product metrics — only what the audience needs to understand direction
Strategic decisions made since the last all-hands and the reasoning behind them
Roadmap highlights that aren't already public

Section 4 — Team highlights (10 min)

Specific launches, completions, or milestones — real work, not congratulatory filler
Keep it brief: name the team, name the outcome, move on
Avoid generic "great work everyone" — either name something specific or skip it

Section 5 — Q&A (15 min)

Facilitator (not the CEO or main presenter) runs this section
Questions collected async before the meeting get priority; live questions fill the remaining time
Unanswered questions get written responses distributed within 48 hours
Hard stop at the time box even if questions remain — continuation goes async

Closing (5 min)

State the three things you want the audience to leave with
Confirm where the recording and summary will live and when they'll be available

What makes most all-hands meetings ineffective

The hierarchy-first running order is one problem. The other is treating all-hands as a broadcast rather than a communication event. A broadcast is efficient for the presenter. A communication event is efficient for the audience.

The difference shows up most clearly in Q&A. When Q&A is 10 minutes at the end of a 50-minute agenda, it gets cut whenever the previous sections run long. The audience learns that questions aren't really the point. After two or three all-hands where Q&A disappears, nobody bothers formulating questions. The meeting becomes a slide deck with narration, which is strictly worse than sending the slide deck.

The third failure mode is the all-hands where everything is positive and nothing is specific. "We had a strong quarter" with no numbers. "The product team did great work" with no mention of what. This communicates that leadership isn't comfortable sharing real information, which produces exactly the rumors and anxiety all-hands meetings are supposed to address.

The cost of all-hands meetings that don't communicate anything is invisible in the moment and visible in the engagement survey six months later. For a quantified look at how this compounds: The meeting tax.

All-hands notes present a different capture problem

All-hands content is different from meeting-to-meeting content. The Q&A alone can generate twenty minutes of context, follow-up commitments, and nuance that didn't make it into the slides. Whoever creates the written summary after the call has to reconstruct it from memory or rewatch the recording. Neither is reliable.

Pavleur generates the all-hands report automatically from the call — including Q&A exchanges, specific commitments made by leadership, and any visuals on screen: product screenshots, roadmap slides, org charts, the revenue chart from Section 3. The report goes to the whole company before the next workday. People who missed the live call get the full record, not a summary that loses the Q&A. Audio-only tools capture the words but not the slides that gave them context; an all-hands summary without the visuals is half a record. For tool comparison: Pavleur vs. alternatives.

On cadence and content freshness

Monthly all-hands work better than quarterly ones for most engineering-heavy companies. The feedback loop is tighter, and each meeting can address specific developments rather than trying to cover three months of context. Quarterly all-hands tend toward retrospective; monthly ones can be current. The tradeoff is that monthly cadence requires more discipline about content — if you're running 12 all-hands a year, each one needs a genuine reason to exist. "It's that time of month" is not enough.

If you find content thin for a given month, run a shorter meeting (30 minutes) with a heavier Q&A focus. That's more valuable than a padded 60-minute agenda.