Meetings and Event Planning
The Anatomy of an Annual Meeting
By Ellen Thompson
Nov 29, 2006, 14:23

The nine people employed by my company, 4 Walls, work from home, so having scheduled meetings to get together and discuss company business is more important than it may be at other companies. Although companies with employees who commute to a central office can take advantage of face to face meetings to handle real time issues, annual meetings are a best practice for any company. Annual meetings allow employees and managers to put the year in perspective and share their accomplishments and difficulties with the rest of the company.

To get the most out of your annual meeting, decide what you want to accomplish during the annual meeting ahead of time. Create and follow a written agenda that supports your meeting's goals and helps you keep on time. Below is a basic outline of this year's 4 Walls annual meeting agenda to help you get started planning a meeting of your own.

Introductions and Ice Breakers
Even if you work side by side with someone on a daily basis, you probably don’t know as much as you should about the people you work with. We use ice breakers to help people get to know each other better. We split our group of 9 into teams of two and three. If you have a larger company, you can split into divisions and then break into smaller groups. We then ask each other a few questions. This year, each of us had to interview our partner and then relay what we learned back to the larger group. The questions were:

1.What do you do on a day to day basis?
2.What is your “super power?”
3.What is your nightmare job?

The first question is pretty straight forward. The “super power” question makes people think about their strengths and the nightmare job question helps us figure out what tasks people don’t want to do. This exercise helps us recognize the contributions each of us makes to the team, as well as identify what talent gaps we have in our organization.

Company Reports
Even though our company is tiny, we have four district divisions. During this part of the meeting, the person leading the efforts of each of our divisions shares what has happened during the past year. Most companies don’t have multiple lines of business. In this case, you can do what we did before we expanded beyond our apartment guide business: have different people speak about different functional areas such as sales, marketing and finance. In addition to providing a snapshot of the business, this exercise provides each speaker with valuable public speaking practice and allows an open forum for all employees to ask questions and provide input.

Financials
Next, our CFO shares information on financial trends. We discuss gains and losses on a percentage basis for key financial line items including revenue, profit and significant expenses, such as payroll. In my past businesses, we tried the “open books” approach, but found that this tended to confuse (and sometimes upset) people, so we have returned to stating financial data in more general terms. In our case, we had a good year that everyone can be proud of having helped achieve. If it had been a tough year, sharing financial data would have been equally useful in rallying support around cost cutting initiatives as well as managing employee expectations about raises.

Company Brainstorming
In the last part of our meeting, we had an open discussion about one aspect of the company. This year, we planned to discuss one of our new business units that has a lot of potential. We have a very bright team and are always interested in leveraging it to get feedback about ideas in general, as well as our execution plans. Unfortunately, we ran late so we didn’t get to our final agenda item. Instead, we posed the questions via email and are awaiting responses.

After our meeting, I sent an email thanking everyone for coming and asking for feedback on the meeting format. We will use this information to refine our planning next year.

Our company meeting was better than expected. In addition to intangible benefits in the areas of team building and employee engagement, we generated several ideas that when implemented will more than pay for the expense of the meeting. You will, too, when you start hosting annual employee meetings.

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