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Your company-wide conference is coming up. What’s the best way engage employees at all-hands meetings?

If it’s virtual, you know you need to bring it. Likewise, if you’re finally flying in the entire team for training and bonding, the stakes are high. Either way, you’ve got one shot to make a great first impression. 

How do you plan, promote, and engage your audience so your meeting makes the biggest impact possible?

Your magic weapon reappears: employee stories. 

Here are the two winning ways to use employee stories for maximum conference engagement: 

• Go wide on employee engagement topics like Core Values in traditional all-hands meetings. 

or

• If you have a specific conference topic, focus on it through an employee experience lens. 

Here are some examples to inspire your all-hands meeting communication efforts. 

Core Values for All Hands or Company-Wide Meetings

Before, During and After The Event

Use employee stories to connect your colleagues to one another, and also promote key themes they’ll learn about during the event. Core Values are a great theme that apply to all employees, no matter where in the world they work. 

For example, you can use short clips featuring an employee story to demonstrate core values to lead up to the event, like this: 

And then, you can weave together several stories to show during the event. 

Finally, you can use the event to collect similar stories from employees about their experiences, tied to core values.

Added bonus: interviewing employees to uncover the stories is a fun engagement activity for your team to supplement your ice breaker fun. Plus, there’s serious work and results in the execution, distribution and re-engagement of that content you’ll collect. 

Let’s take a deeper dive on these three times you can use stories for your all-hands.

Show The Conference Topic Through An Employee-Engagement Lens

Before the Event

Short clips are great to promo the event, featuring key conference participants or employee stories relevant to the topic. 

For example, if you’re holding a conference to educate your employees about the importance of diversity and inclusion, you may want to create a D&I focused clip like this as promotion: 

Add in your promotional copy a call to action referencing the conference, e.g. “See you at Thrive 2023!”

During the Event

Like a lot of organizations, the American College of Cardiology moved their annual in person conference to a virtual event during COVID-19. 

To celebrate the hard work of its members, and also bring together this massive community (virtually), they used employee stories.

It was important to ACC that the member stories communicate

• the strength and dedication of its members in serving patients in the pandemic
• the diversity of their community

Rather than use medical or membership data to communicate those two critical messages, ACC knew that real stories from the cardiologists were the best and most compelling way to do it. 

This video kicked off ACC.22 Opening Session in Washington, DC.

Read more here about how we helped ACC execute their stories at their conference. 

The diversity, equity and inclusion at Lexis Nexis had an opportunity to educate executives about the fellowship program they launched that year. She used employee stories to bring the program to life and showed these stories during their in-person meeting:

After the Event: Reinforcing the Messaging 

Your goal is for your conference-goers to leave energized and ready to either lean into your culture and messaging, or make changes. You’ll need to remind them and reinforce conference topics in the days after your Big Event. 

Here you can use longer form content, especially if your audience is expecting follow up from the event. Here are longer form videos that reinforce conference-focused content.

And, you can get ready for next year by getting stories after the conference that show its impact! See a great example from Deloitte below. 

In order to really engage employees at all-hands meeetings, think about the types of experiences they’ve had that can illustrate your conference theme. Then, you can optimize the content so it works overtime for you before, during, and after your conference. 

Yet another way employee stories can save the day!

Shine a spotlight on your employees

Whether your all-hands is two or twelve months away, it’s always a great time to capture team members’ stories. Learn how to create employee spotlights that rock (like we do it at Stories Inc. 😊 ) in our content creation guide.