All-hands meeting: agenda, format, examples — and how every office hears it in its own language (2026)

An all-hands meeting is the one meeting the whole company attends: leadership shares the numbers, the decisions and the stories everyone should know, and everyone gets to ask about them. The name comes from the ship's call "all hands on deck" — every person aboard, whatever their job, on the same deck at the same time. That is the whole test of the format. A meeting that half the company watches as a recording, or follows through a summary email the next morning, is a broadcast, not an all-hands.

This guide is the craft first — what belongs in an all-hands and what doesn't, how long and how often, an agenda template you can copy, three filled-in examples — then the mechanics: where the all-hands lives in the tools your company already uses, and what happens to the questions and the answers after the call. Because the all-hands has a second audience: the people who were in another time zone, in a customer meeting, or on leave, and who find out what was said from whatever the meeting left behind.

What an all-hands meeting is — and what it isn't

Three company-wide formats are often called the same thing, and they are built for different jobs:

The lines blur, and in many companies "town hall" and "all-hands" are the same calendar event. The useful distinction is who gets to speak: an all-hands has a floor, a town hall has a microphone that goes to the audience, a broadcast has neither. If nobody outside the leadership team said a word, it was a broadcast, whatever the invitation called it.

An all-hands is not a status meeting with everyone invited. A team's weekly numbers belong in the team's weekly; the all-hands carries the three numbers that describe the company, the one decision that changes something for everyone, and the one story that shows the work. Everything else is a message in the channel.

What to include: the standard format

An all-hands that people keep attending has five parts, in this order:

1. The numbers, the same three every time. Revenue or usage against plan, the one operational number the company is steering by, and headcount or hiring. Three, not thirteen; the same three, so that the room learns to read them and notices when one moves. Ten minutes, with the slide posted in the channel beforehand.
2. One decision, explained. The thing that changed since the last all-hands and why. Not a list of changes — the one that affects the most people, told by the person who owns it, with the reasoning and the trade-off that was rejected. A decision explained once to everyone saves twenty one-to-one explanations of it.
3. One story from the work. A team shows something it shipped, a customer win, a support case that was handled well. The point is that a person in another team sees what their colleagues actually do. Ten minutes, the team presents, not the executive.
4. Questions — the ones submitted in writing and the ones asked live. The longest slot and the one that makes the format. Questions collected in the channel during the week come first, read aloud and answered on the record; then the floor is open. A question the company asked and leadership did not answer is the all-hands everyone remembers.
5. The close: what was decided, what is open, who follows up. Two minutes. The decision restated in one sentence, the questions that were parked with a name and a date next to each, and where the recording and the summary will be.

What stays out: anything that needs a decision from the room. An all-hands of 200 people does not decide; it informs and it answers. Decisions are made in the leadership weekly and explained in the all-hands. Welcomes of new colleagues go at the start, in one minute per person; birthdays, anniversaries and thank-yous go into the channel.

How long, how often

The cadence follows the size of the company, because the cost of an all-hands is the headcount multiplied by the length:

Two rules hold at every size. The all-hands has a fixed slot the company can plan around — the first Thursday, the last Friday — because a meeting that moves is a meeting people miss. And it is scheduled for the offices that find it hardest: a company spread from Lisbon to Singapore alternates the hour between a European morning and a European evening, so the same office is not the one joining at 9 p.m. every month.

How to run one: before, during, after

The week before, collect questions where the company already talks. Post one message in the all-hands channel: "All-hands on Thursday — what should leadership answer? Reply here, or send it to me directly if you'd rather not sign it." Questions that come in writing are already half-answered: leadership sees the pattern, prepares the numbers and arrives with an answer instead of a reaction. Post the three numbers and the agenda in the same channel the day before, so the meeting starts with the slide already read.

During the meeting, protect the question slot. The numbers run over; the story runs over; the Q&A is what gets cut, and the Q&A is the all-hands. Run the first three parts to the minute, and open the floor with the written questions — in the order they arrived, with the name of the person who asked unless they asked not to be named. Answer live questions through the raised hands in the order they went up, and when a question cannot be answered yet, say so and give it a date rather than an answer that will be corrected next week. The moderator is not the CEO: a person who is not answering keeps the queue, the clock and the chat.

After the meeting, publish what was said — the same day, to everyone, including the people who weren't there. The decision in one sentence, the questions with their answers, the parked questions with a name and a date. Put it where the next all-hands will find it, next to the recording. The all-hands that lives only in the memory of the people who attended is an all-hands the company does not have.

An all-hands meeting agenda template

[Company] — All-hands, [month]
Date: [date] · Time: [start]–[end] · Link: [meeting link]
Purpose: everyone hears the same three things and gets to ask about them.
Moderator: [name — keeps the queue and the clock] · Notes: [name or "the recap"]
Pre-reads: the three numbers (posted in the channel the day before), [link]

1. Welcome and new colleagues — [moderator] — 3 min — information
One minute each: name, team, what they will work on.

2. The quarter in three numbers — [CEO or lead] — 10 min — information
[Number 1] against plan · [number 2] · hiring. Same three as last time.

3. One decision, explained — [decision owner] — 10 min — information
[What changed, why, what was rejected.]

4. From the work — [team] — 10 min — information
[What shipped, who it is for, what it took.]

5. Questions — all — 15 min — discussion
Written questions first, in the order received; then the floor.

6. Close — [moderator] — 2 min
The decision in one sentence · parked questions: [name] — [question] — by [date] · where the recording and the summary will be.

Three filled-in examples

Monthly all-hands, 80 people — 45 minutes

Purpose: everyone hears the same three things and gets to ask about them.
1. Welcome: two new colleagues in support and one in sales — Ana — 3 min — information
2. September in three numbers: ARR against plan, active customers, open roles — Tomasz — 10 min — information
3. Why we are moving support to a follow-the-sun rota from November — Priya — 10 min — information
4. The onboarding redesign: what shipped and what the first customers said — the product team — 10 min — information
5. Questions: four submitted in writing, then the floor — all — 10 min — discussion
6. Close — Ana — 2 min

Weekly company meeting, 20 people — 25 minutes

Purpose: the week's numbers, one update, open questions.
1. The week in three numbers — founder — 5 min — information
2. One update: the new pricing page goes live Monday — Mateusz — 5 min — information
3. One demo: what Lena built this week — Lena — 5 min — information
4. Questions — all — 8 min — discussion
5. Close — founder — 2 min

Quarterly all-hands, 600 people in four regions — 60 minutes

Purpose: the quarter's results, next quarter's priorities, and the company's questions answered on the record.
1. Q3 results in three numbers — CEO — 10 min — information
2. Next quarter's three priorities and what we stop doing — CEO — 10 min — information
3. One decision, explained: the new sales territories — head of sales — 10 min — information
4. From the work: one story from the Bangalore team — the team — 8 min — information
5. Questions: submitted in each region's channel during the week, then the floor — all — 20 min — discussion
6. Close — moderator — 2 min
Pre-reads: the results deck, posted in the all-hands channel on Monday.

Nine more agendas, from the daily stand-up to the board meeting, are in meeting agenda examples; the anatomy of the format itself is in the meeting agenda template guide.

Notice what the three examples have in common: the question slot is the longest or the second longest, the numbers are the same three every time, and every example ends with the close — the one item that produces the record.

Where the all-hands lives in the tools you already use

Each major platform has a format for the company-wide meeting and a place for what it leaves behind, and each stops at a different point. Documented behaviour only, from the vendors' own pages, with the month each page was checked:

Two things are the same everywhere. The record is written once, in the language the meeting was held in; and the person who joined by link without an account, or from another time zone the next morning, gets it only if someone shares it with them.

How the questions and the answers come back

InterMIND is a communication space where a meeting lives in a channel, so the all-hands has an obvious home: a channel the whole company is a member of. The questions of the week arrive there as replies, each office typing in its own language and reading the others in its own; the three numbers and the deck are posted there the day before — and during the call the questions list, posted as a note, goes on every screen next to the video tiles with Share to conference, read by each participant in their own language; and if the agenda or the slides are drafted somewhere else, they can land in the channel by email — the channel's owner gives it an address of its own, and a message sent to it appears as a regular message with the sender named and attachments kept.

The meeting itself is the channel's own room, 50 to 1,500 participants depending on the host's plan. The host decides what the room may do: in the gear menu of the participants list, the host locks screen sharing for everyone but themselves, and the lock is saved on the meeting, so the setting made for this month's all-hands is still in force next month. When the all-hands runs as a meeting by link instead — with contractors or a partner company in the room — the same menu also locks the microphone, the camera, reactions, and the chat for guests outside the host's team. Raising a hand stays available under every lock, so the queue for the question slot works in a room where microphones are off until called on. When several things are shared at once, Present to everyone puts the one that matters on the main stage of everyone in the room at that moment; anyone sharing can press it. The host can start a server recording; every participant sees that it is running.

When the call ends, the recap is written from the meeting itself: a summary, the points marked agreed, open or disputed, the action items with owners, each line keeping its timestamp; the transcript and the recording sit next to it. It arrives by email, as a message in the channel and as a link in the calendar event, and every signed-in member reads it in their own language — the record is translated per reader, not written once in the language the room happened to use, which is what makes "the office that joined at 7 a.m. and the one that joined at 9 p.m." one audience rather than two. Any member can correct the summary, every edit keeps its author and revision history, and the channel keeps the recap of every past session, so the answer leadership gave in March is one click away in October. The host can add a recap copy to any address — an HR tracker's inbound mailbox, a CRM — so the parked questions reach the system that follows them up without anyone forwarding anything; where a system needs fields rather than an email, the same recap is a Zapier trigger, a webhook and an API.

For a recurring meeting in a channel, the open items of the previous session — the parked questions with their owners — are read back when the next recap is written and marked done or not done from what was said, and at the start of the next session Mia names the open items and their owners, so last month's "we'll come back to you on that" is spoken about rather than lost. This part runs for selected accounts while it is being refined.

A guest joins by link, without an account and at no cost — from a phone, in the browser — and hears the meeting live in their own language. There is no record for a guest afterwards — the account is free, and it is what makes the record reachable. The host provides the room and, on a paid plan, pays only for the members active in the previous 28 days; members who go quiet keep their access at no cost.

• Open a complete recap — a real record rendered by the same code that writes yours.
• Try the live demo — no signup; speak, and hear the room translated per listener.

The all-hands as a craft survives every tool: somebody still has to choose the three numbers, explain the one decision and protect the question slot. What doesn't have to survive is the second job — writing up the answers by hand after the call, in one language, for the offices that read others.

FAQ

What is an all-hands meeting?

An all-hands meeting is a regular meeting that the whole company attends, where leadership shares the numbers, the decisions and the stories everyone should know, and anyone can ask questions. The name comes from the naval call "all hands on deck". It differs from a town hall, which is built around the audience's questions on one occasion, and from a broadcast, where only one side speaks.

What is the purpose of an all-hands meeting?

To give everyone in the company the same picture at the same time — where the company stands, what changed and why — and to answer the company's questions on the record. A secondary purpose is visibility between teams: a person in support sees what engineering shipped, and the other way round. It is not for making decisions; those are made in smaller meetings and explained in the all-hands.

How long should an all-hands meeting be?

Twenty to thirty minutes for a company of up to thirty people, forty-five minutes for most companies, and an hour for a quarterly all-hands of a large company. The length is set by the question slot: if the Q&A is the part that gets cut, the meeting is too short or the first three parts are too long.

How often should you have an all-hands meeting?

Weekly up to about thirty people, every two weeks or monthly up to a few hundred, monthly up to a thousand, and quarterly above that with regional all-hands in between. Whatever the cadence, the slot is fixed — the same day of the week or month — so the company can plan around it.

What is the difference between a town hall and an all-hands meeting?

In most companies they are the same calendar event, and the words are used interchangeably. Where a distinction is drawn: an all-hands is the recurring company meeting with a fixed agenda — numbers, a decision, a story, questions — while a town hall is held on an occasion, is built around the audience's questions to one or a few executives, and often has a larger, more passive audience. The test is who gets to speak: in an all-hands, teams present their own work.

What should be on an all-hands meeting agenda?

Five things, in order: a welcome for new colleagues; the same three company numbers as last time; one decision, explained by its owner; one story from the work, presented by the team that did it; and the questions — written ones first, then the floor — followed by a two-minute close that restates the decision and lists the parked questions with a name and a date. The template above is the blank version.

How do you make an all-hands meeting engaging?

Collect questions in writing during the week and answer them by name; let teams present their own work instead of having an executive summarise it; keep the numbers to the same three so people learn to read them; and keep the question slot longer than any other. An all-hands people find engaging is one where something they asked was answered.

Who runs an all-hands meeting?

The CEO or the head of the company usually presents the numbers and the strategy, but the meeting is run by a moderator who is not answering questions — often the chief of staff, the head of people or an office manager — who keeps the queue, the clock and the chat, reads the written questions and calls on the raised hands in order.

Sources: Microsoft — Recap in Microsoft Teams; Microsoft — Start, stop, and find meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams; Microsoft — Use live captions in Teams meetings; Zoom — Using Meeting Summary with AI; Zoom — Supported languages for Zoom AI features; Zoom — Generating meeting agenda with AI Companion; Google — Calendar & Meet settings for "Take notes for me"; Google Meet — "Take notes for me" in Google Meet; Slack — Use huddles in Slack; Slack — Meeting agenda template. Vendors change plans, features and language lists over time; check their pages for the current state. Each table cell names the month its fact was checked — the earliest checked August 2026, the latest checked October 2026.