Whither the Old Fashioned ‘Employee Town Hall’

Monday in the Executive Communication Report—to which you would be stone cold crazy not to subscribe because it is both useful and free—I published a communicator’s wish for a better name than “employee town halls,” because employees have come to translate that term to mean, “airing of grievances.” I asked ECR readers—most of the leading exec comms pros in the world, to suggest a better name.

“Chat” was the common theme of the first wave of suggestions, published Wednesday—”fireside chat,” “leadership chat,” and the like. But a number of readers objected to “chat” for being too … chatty. 

Communication Intelligence newsletter editor Michael Toebe suggested “Organizational Discussion.” I told him that brought to my mind Star Wars‘ Imperial March.

And I started to wonder if the problem isn’t the name of these kinds of corporate leadership meetings, but the premise.

When I started studying and commenting on employee and executive communication for a living a little over three decades ago, employee town halls were an innovation. Most companies put out employee newsletters. Some companies offered clunky ways for employees to share opinions or ideas with management, then called “upward communication.” (My favorite Onion headline of all time: “Best Buy’s Employee Suggestion Box Brimming With Urine.”) Progressive companies put top managers in front of a crowd of employees and let employees ask whatever they liked.

Employees asked more polite questions back then. Also, communicators often filtered the questions too, to make sure the question were—um, germane. As Henry Kissinger once said at the outset of a press conference, “I hope your questions match my answers.”

But generally, everyone arrived at these sessions with a sense of goodwill: Management was courageous and caring enough to show up. Employees were grateful management thought enough of them to create all this downtime to bring them in. And the communicators who staged them could call them whatever they wanted, and strive to make the meetings both substantive and friendly.

In this era of stark political division, employees struggle to talk civilly with one another, let alone with CEOs who no longer publicly agonize when they lay people off by the thousands, but preen to Wall Street instead. (And internally, offer the weakest reassurances that AI won’t cost people their jobs, it’ll only make those jobs better.) So what’s the socio-emotional basis for all getting together to have a big ole—town hall meeting, chat, Organizational Discussion. (Or “all hands meeting,” a term a consultant I know says people object to because it implies to older, more conservative cultures that it’s mandatory. On the other hand, I’ve heard that at least one corporation stopped using “all hands” to be sensitive to some employees who might not have hands.)

My consultant friend, who has put on more than 150 of these shows, acknowledges that some town halls are boring and uninformative but insists: “I do the employee surveys after each one, and when done well, employees appreciate them and can walk away energized.”

Exec comms pro: Are those happy gatherings the exception, or the rule? (Hey, what about “Leadership Gatherings” …)