The case against the all-hands meeting.

I've been quietly removing the all-hands meeting from organisations for about five years. Not all at once — just letting it drift into a quarterly cadence, then a half-yearly one, then nothing. Engagement, by every measure I track, goes up.

The all-hands assumes a particular theory of how culture forms: that it forms through synchronous broadcast from the top. People hear the same words at the same time, and that creates shared understanding. In practice almost nobody is paying full attention. They're triaging Slack on a second screen. The shared understanding is a fiction the leadership team has about its own communication.

What does work is a written update people can read at their own pace, with comments open underneath. The questions that get asked in writing are sharper than the ones asked at a microphone. The leadership team has to think harder. The signal-to-ceremony ratio is much better.

I'm not against gathering. I'm against gathering as a substitute for clarity. If your all-hands is the place where strategy gets explained for the first time, the strategy isn't written down well enough yet, and the meeting won't fix that.