Webinars & Events Zoomtopia How-to

How to Create the Best All-Hands Meeting Experience With Zoom

Leading companies leverage Zoom for seamless all-hands experiences. Learn how Zoom Webinars & Zoom Meetings can simplify your next all-hands.

4 min read

Published on December 16, 2019

In this blog

01 Multiple ways to join = better attendance - Jumplink to Multiple ways to join = better attendance
02 Balance sharing content and showing the speaker - Jumplink to Balance sharing content and showing the speaker
03 Create a secure environment - Jumplink to Create a secure environment
04 Try Zoom Meetings - Jumplink to Try Zoom Meetings
05 Quality is key - Jumplink to Quality is key
06 Learn more at our webinar - Jumplink to Learn more at our webinar

Janelle Raney

Head of Product Marketing

Company all-hands or town-hall meetings are a powerful way to build organizational alignment. Connecting on video with hundreds or even thousands of employees at the same time empowers companies to provides employees with important updates, answer their pressing questions, and create a more cohesive, connected culture. Traditionally, hosting and organizing these large calls have been challenging and expensive. Zoom Webinars provides users with the flexibility and feature set to easily coordinate all-hands calls and create a more effective, informative, and interactive experience. We talked with some experts at Zoomtopia 2019 to discuss how companies leverage Zoom for all-hands calls and other mass internal communications. Here are a few ways Zoom can help your organization create a premium all-hands experience.

Attendees can join Zoom meetings and webinars in a number of ways, including on their phones, desktop, and in conference rooms. This flexibility simplifies the experience and improves attendance. “What really makes the experience powerful with Zoom is the entire organization is built out with Zoom. This is really a key factor of how we use Zoom with webinar and translate the meeting across the world. And the multiple platforms really make it possible to tune in wherever you are, and that’s been a huge win for us and is the reason why we hold our all-hands calls over Zoom. We’ve even had people dial into an all-hands and present on their phone from an Uber.” — Austin Reisman, Senior Systems Engineer, Uber Technologies

With the webinar platform, you can use “follow the host” to control what your attendees see. You can easily balance between sharing visual content and showing the speaker video to create an all-hands experience that is informative, engaging, and more personal to employees. “We wanted to decide when we show content and when we show the camera. So if we have our CEO giving a presentation and he wants to talk through his slides, we click this button, “Swap shared screen with video,” and content will be shown on all devices. And anytime our CEO is giving an impassioned Q&A response, then we click that button again, and his face is front and center in front of everyone. This feature allowed us to take back control and built out the all-hands experience across the world.” — Jerry Yuan, AV Design Engineer, Uber Technologies

All-hands calls often discuss sensitive or confidential information, and hosts need to create a secure environment to avoid leaks and stay ahead of the competition. With Zoom, you have options to watermark any screenshots taken and even the audio streams so if confidential information is shared, you can easily trace it back to the source of the leak. Another important tip to keep your meeting or webinar secure is to enable an option so only users who are signed into their Zoom client with a specified domain can join. “There are plenty of security features we have enabled, including one so only participants who are signed into their Zoom accounts are allowed to join those all-hands. That way, you’re not managing your users and scrolling through your users to see who is active, to see who people are. And we are able to limit security breaches.” — William Gil, Project Engineer, Zoom

Many companies use Zoom Webinars for large all-hands calls to better manage participants, but Zoom Meetings also is useful when you want to create a more interactive, personal experience. “At Zoom, we run our all-hands using Zoom Meetings, and it’s easier to communicate and interact. In the Q&A, for example, instead of having to promote someone to a panelist or unmute them, I just enable everyone to unmute themselves and it’s ready to go. You can jump in, turn on your camera, and have that one-to-one interaction.” — William Gil, Project Engineer, Zoom

The quality of audio and video you are delivering is important for live events, and it’s critical when you share the recording with employees afterward. With Zoom recordings, you have a secure way to play the session back with searchable transcripts, and the versatility to see content and the speaker and gallery views. Viewers can also adjust the playback speed to 1.5 or 2x. “We drew inspiration from the broadcast industry to send the best, highest-definition content from our side so that when we deliver our all-hands content to our employees, they get the best experience they can get on their device. We found out the best way to do this was to use two capture cards, one for our camera stream and the other for our content stream. This enables us to broadcast HD content.” — Jerry Yuan, AV Design Engineer, Uber Technologies

Want to learn more about how to make your company all-hands meeting a more effective internal communications tool? Our own William Gil will share additional tips and tricks during the “Leveraging Zoom for Company All-Hands” webinar on Dec. 18. Register today!