‘Relevance is the foundation’: Refining town halls with data

Town halls remain the most popular channels for leaders to communicate with employees (68%) according to the 2024 Ragan Communications Benchmark Report. And as the way we work continues to evolve and remains dispersed, they not only continue to prove to be crucial touchpoints for sharing executive communications, but platforming and recognizing the hard work of others across the organization, too.

Raquel Cool, internal communications lead at Cisco Networking, knows this firsthand. Sitting within the executive comms team at one of the company’s largest engineering communications, Cool must regularly communicate with nearly 30,000 employees. Suffice it to say, town halls play an outsized role in her organization’s success.

Ahead of her session on elevating town halls at Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville next month, we caught up with Cool to learn more about how she engineers these events to deliver what both executives and employees want from them.

Focus on relevance, creativity and consistency

Cool considers a town hall successful if it’s able to nail five specific goals:

• Portray a united and energetic leadership team.
• Deliver relevant executive updates about the business, while also addressing topics that are top-of-mind for employees.
• Celebrate progress and innovation with a focus on the teams that make it happen.
• Illuminate how the work teams are doing connects to larger company purpose and strategy. This makes the recognition actionable.
• Nurture culture and community to demonstrate how each employee is part of something bigger.

In order to achieve these goals, Cool believes every town hall must be designed with three guiding principles in mind:

• Relevance: This is achieved by analyzing pulse data to determine what employees care about.
• Consistency: Communicators can codify town halls and ensure they are consistent by implementing essential practices that drive success.
• Creativity: Understanding which approaches earn engagement and interest will empower you to get creative with session formats and styles to ensure they don’t cause employees’ attention to glaze over.

“Relevance is the foundation,” said Cool. “You can have consistency and creativity, but if your content isn’t relevant, neither will matter. Data drives relevance and keeps you close to what employees care about. There are many ways to tune into employee perspectives, including focus groups, surveys, listening tours, message boards, building feedback loops into your internal comms and/or partnering with internal teams who are also measuring employee sentiment.”

Once you have that employee sentiment pulse, the real creative and fun work begins.

The value of an executive brief for town hall prep

Raquel Cool, Internal Communications Lead, Cisco Networking

While executive briefs are more common during issues management or media relations, Cool prepares an executive brief for each town hall to streamline with workflow, approvals and processes across all participants, stakeholders and departments.

“This brief gives executives and planning teams a snapshot of the event and what’s key to know,” explained Cool. “Drafting the brief is my starting place for developing a proposed show flow, moving it through approvals, and prepping executives and supporting teams on the content.”

She’ll share her anatomy of an actionable executive brief in Nashville, covering the nuts and bolts of the document including how employee sentiment factors in, Q&A strategy, leadership availability, wardrobe considerations and other things to know ahead before the town hall starts.

Nailing the timing

Earlier in her career, Cool learned that timing considerations are the secret ingredient to any succesful event — town halls included. She maximizes efficiency and experience by considering the duration of the show, the cadence of town halls and the segments within the session:

• Duration. Whether it’s 90 minutes, 60 minutes or 30 minutes will depend on what employees are telling you.
• Cadence. The frequency of town halls should also depend on employee sentiment, along with the rate of change in the business. It may not be necessary to have one weekly, or even monthly.
• Segments. Considering how much time is allotted for each segment will also allow you to cover more material and get creative with how they are presented.

“I’m a fan of tighter timing for segments,” Cool said.

“If too much time is given to a topic, it can make the whole session drag. Keeping segment timing tight gives variety to the overall event and challenges speakers to succinctly convey information — ideally getting straight to the ‘what’s in it for me.’ You’d be surprised by how much can be conveyed in three minutes.”

Learn more from Cool during her “Elevating Your Town Hall Strategy” session on Aug.13 at in Nashville Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference. Register now!