Slido

Published on: Dec 9, 2019

Hosting an all-hands or town hall meeting is a great way to shake up company culture and obtain real insights from across your team. At these company-wide gatherings, all-employees (hence the name!) get together to discuss the company and share progress and development in their area of the business. A regular all-hands is a fantastic opportunity to foster a culture of transparency and help to set clear goals for the future. 

Bringing together your entire team can seem like quite a challenge – especially if many of your colleagues are based remotely. Thankfully, products such as Slido and Catchbox not only help to solve these problems, they also work great when used together! We caught up with Slido’s Chief Meeting Designer Juraj Holub to learn how to create awesome all-hands meetings with Slido and Catchbox.

Interaction made easy

Slido is the leading Q&A and polling platform used by companies, event managers and educational institutions worldwide to give a voice to their audience. Allowing organisers to collect questions in advance, Slido maximizes the effectiveness of any question and answer session, whilst also removing some of the pressure and anxiety that comes with speaking directly to management or in front of an audience. 

All-hands on deck

As their product has grown and developed, so too has the Slido team. To ensure all 150 members of staff have the opportunity to make their voices heard, Slido hosts their monthly all-hands meetings. These company-wide gatherings are a great way to foster company culture and drive transparency at all levels. Check out this great guide from Slido on why you should start your own all-hands setup!

Everybody involved, wherever they are

Bringing everyone together in a way that’s engaging for all participants is not without its difficulties. Things get even trickier when you factor in remote colleagues tuning in from across the globe. How do you ensure everyone has the chance to participate?

For Slido, the company’s own solutions play a fundamental role in ensuring these meetings are engaging for everyone. Questions are crowdsourced up to one week ahead of the all-hands summit, ensuring all voices can be considered and prepared for discussion. The team also employs Slido’s live poll feature, allowing for real-time feedback from attendees at key points in the meeting. Speakers can check in with the audiences’ understanding of key strategic decisions or seek honest, anonymous feedback on topics and ideas.

Combining top tools for awesome all-hands meetings

Slido and Catchbox and have been designed with a shared focus on increasing audience engagement and interaction. Though they approach the issue from different perspectives, both products are used with this same goal in mind. Having seen Catchbox in action at several conferences, Juraj knew a throwable wireless microphone could add an extra dimension to Slido’s all-hands meetings. Since creating the company’s early town halls, the team has been using Slido and Catchbox in tandem to create awesome experiences for his colleagues.

“Catchbox plays a crucial role in our all-hands meetings. Passing it around makes things more enjoyable and loosens the audience up. It’s great way to get people to relax a little and help them settle into the meeting.”

When it’s time to cover the meeting’s key points, the combination of Slido and Catchbox really comes into its own. “Let’s say we want to learn about why people voted a certain way in one of our live polls. We simply throw Catchbox out into the audience and find out more.” This mixture of structure and spontaneity helps maintain a dynamic ebb and flow to the meeting, in turn keeping everyone involved and active in the content.

Keep remote teams engaged with Catchbox

Catchbox is also key to making sure Slido’s remote workers are able to get the most out all-hands meetings. Employees in the audience at Slido’s Bratislava office can ask questions quickly and easily using Catchbox, which captures and clear audio for other offices and remote colleagues. Members of the audience can simply pass the Catchbox to one another when they want to ask a question or give a response. As a result, much less time is spent waiting for the mic, which makes a big difference to those listening in via video collaboration.

“Quick, effective voice transition seems like a simple thing but it makes such a difference. We always try to keep online participants in mind and with Catchbox, there’s no delays or wait times and the audio quality is always excellent. In many ways, it helps to remove some of the distance between our main office and our remote colleagues at our all-hands meetings.”

Words of wisdom

As a master meeting designer, we asked Juraj for any advice that he would like to pass on to new users looking to introduce Catchbox to their all-hands meetings. Here’s what he had to say:

“Just go for it! It’s so easy to set up and will quickly become something you can’t do without. But remember to tell your team’s sports superstars that they can make small passes – it doesn’t need to be a 50-meter throw every time!” 

Check out Slido’s blog for more tips, tricks and awesome insights from Juraj and the Slido team.