The common failure is staging. The hard questions get screened out, the answers are rehearsed, and the whole thing is dressed up to look open while staying tightly controlled. People can tell.
The job is designing for candour, not theatre.
A real town hall builds trust. A staged one erodes it, and it erodes faster than a flat all-hands ever could, because the audience came expecting honesty.
A town hall that works is designed for the opposite. Not for the smoothest run, but for real questions getting real answers in the room. That means building the format, the surfacing of questions and the room so leadership can be open and credible under live pressure, not protected from it.
The open, recurring forum where employees raise what is on their mind and leadership answers. The work is keeping it genuinely open as it becomes routine.
Built around the unscripted exchange, where the value is in the questions nobody planned for and the answers given without a safety net.
The hardest version. The company has questions, some of them uncomfortable, and the room needs to feel heard rather than managed.
Designed so people on a screen can ask and be answered as readily as people in the room, instead of becoming spectators to it.
A brand launch built as a festival - moving 300 post-merger employees from keynote to competitive to celebration in one day.
Three phases - alignment, collaboration, celebration - built so 350 colleagues from nine countries could meet for the first time.
For a remote workforce, a winter party isn't a night out. It's the one day the company actually becomes a room.
A town hall is one of the moments where people need clarity, connection and momentum.
Maya Patel
Head of People, Vantage
Most agencies treat a town hall as a broadcast to produce. We treat it as a conversation to design. We start with what the room needs to ask and what leadership needs to answer, and build the format back from that. It is the difference between a town hall that looks open and one that actually builds trust.
Regular town halls, leadership Q&A sessions, change and restructure town halls, and hybrid or distributed formats. From a single-site session to a company-wide town hall reaching people across several locations.
We design for them rather than around them. We build how questions are gathered and put to leadership so the hard ones surface, and we coach speakers to answer honestly under live pressure. A town hall earns trust precisely because the difficult questions get a real answer.
Cost depends on scale, venue, production and audience size. Once we know what the town hall needs to achieve and the rough headcount, we can give a directional read on what to plan for.
Four to eight weeks out for a single town hall, earlier for a hybrid or change-driven one where the stakes and the questions are higher.
London is home and most of our work runs here or within easy reach. We deliver across the UK, and we design hybrid town halls so a distributed company can ask and be answered as one room, even across locations.
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