The all-hands meeting is being killed. Not by a single decision, not by a memo from leadership, but by a thousand small defections: the engineering team that stopped attending, the CEO who started sending a recorded video instead, the company that quietly canceled it one quarter and nobody noticed.
Death by a thousand cuts. And the case for the killing is stronger than the case for keeping the patient alive.
The Welch-era original
The all-hands meeting as we know it was not born in a boardroom. It was born in a factory. Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, turned the town hall into a management tool in the 1980s and 1990s, using it for direct communication and cultural alignment across a sprawling conglomerate, as documented in a Harvard Business Review article on Welch’s approach. The idea was simple: put the CEO in a room with employees, let them ask questions, and use the transparency to break through layers of bureaucracy.
That original all-hands was a high-leverage intervention. Not a weekly ritual. A deliberate tool deployed at moments when alignment mattered more than efficiency. Welch held them when there was something to communicate — a strategy shift, a major acquisition, a cultural reset. The format served the message, not the calendar.
Somewhere in the 2000s, the format detached from its purpose. The all-hands became a recurring calendar slot. Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly. The message stopped mattering as much as the fact that the meeting happened. The ritual outlived its reason.
Inertia, not evidence
Why does the all-hands persist in mid-stage companies? Not because the data supports it. A Bain & Company study estimated that unnecessary meetings cost large companies millions of dollars annually in wasted salary time, finding that 15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings, with a significant portion deemed unproductive. The all-hands, with its full-company attendance and its tendency to drift into status updates that could have been an email, is a prime contributor to that figure.
The reason is inertia. The all-hands is a psychological comfort blanket for leadership. It feels like culture. It feels like communication. The perceived risk of removing it — that employees will feel disconnected, that alignment will fray, that the company will lose its sense of shared purpose — outweighs the documented waste for most leaders. They keep the meeting because the cost of canceling it feels higher than the cost of holding it, even when the evidence says otherwise.
That is a failure of imagination. The companies that have killed the all-hands have not suffered the feared consequences. They have built better alternatives.
The async-first evidence base
The strongest evidence for killing the all-hands comes not from consultants or academics but from the operating manuals of companies that have already done it.
Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, has written extensively against meetings, arguing they fragment focus and that most can be replaced by written communication. In his book ‘Rework’, co-authored with David Heinemeier Hansson, he states plainly: ‘Meetings are toxic.’ That is not a nuanced position. It is a design constraint. 37signals has built its entire operating model around async written communication, with no room for the kind of synchronous ritual that the all-hands represents.
GitLab goes further. Its public handbook, the document that governs how the company operates, explicitly discourages synchronous meetings. ‘Meetings are the last resort, not the first option,’ the handbook states. GitLab recommends using issues, merge requests, and async updates instead of live gatherings. For a company that has been fully remote since its founding, the all-hands is not just inefficient. It is structurally incompatible with how the organization works.
Stripe takes a different but related approach. Its ‘memo culture’ means that major decisions are made via written memos rather than meetings. Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, has discussed this in interviews, emphasizing that memos allow for deeper thought and async feedback, as detailed on Stripe’s blog about memo culture. The all-hands, in Stripe’s model, is not the place where decisions are made or communicated. It is a downstream artifact of decisions that have already been reached through writing.
These three companies — 37signals, GitLab, and Stripe — are not outliers. They are the leading edge of a pattern. They have publicly documented their reasoning, and their reasoning is consistent: synchronous meetings are a tax on attention. The all-hands is the largest and most visible form of that tax.
The all-hands is a psychological comfort blanket for leadership. The perceived risk of removing it outweighs the documented waste for most leaders.
What replaces it
The most common replacements for the live all-hands are not substitutes. They are upgrades.
Recorded video updates, delivered through platforms like Loom, allow employees to watch on their own time and at their own pace, as Loom has argued in its blog on async all-hands. The CEO records a ten-minute update. The team watches it when they are ready. The information is preserved, searchable, and skippable. Nobody sits through a forty-five-minute meeting to hear the three minutes that matter to them.
Written memos, as practiced at Stripe, offer something deeper. A well-written memo forces clarity. It requires the author to think through their argument before presenting it. It allows readers to engage with the content at their own depth, to re-read, to pause, to think. A live presentation, by contrast, rewards performance over substance.
Coda, the collaborative document platform, has published a template and guide for async all-hands meetings, suggesting that written updates with embedded video can replace live synchronous sessions. The template is a sign that this is not a niche approach. It is becoming a recognized practice, with tooling built specifically to support it.
The shift here is not from one format to another. It is from synchronous to asynchronous decision-making. The all-hands was a broadcast. The replacements are conversations that happen on their own schedule. That is a deeper change than any format swap.
The exception
None of this means the all-hands is always wrong. It means it is wrong as a default.
The all-hands retains genuine value in high-stakes moments. Major strategic pivots. Layoffs. Acquisitions. Moments where real-time Q&A and emotional presence are irreplaceable. Jack Welch’s original town halls were deployed in exactly these contexts, as the Harvard Business Review article on his approach describes. They were not weekly rituals. They were interventions.
Even the critics concede this point implicitly. Jason Fried, who calls meetings toxic, does not argue that a company facing a crisis should send a memo instead of gathering its people. The debate is not about the format itself. It is about its frequency and purpose. An all-hands held once a quarter to address a strategic question is a different thing from an all-hands held every Monday to run through status updates that could have been written down.
The mistake is treating the exception as the rule. The all-hands is a tool, not a ritual. When it serves a genuine purpose, it is valuable. When it is a default, it is waste.
The companies that have killed the all-hands have not eliminated it entirely. They have demoted it from a standing obligation to a deliberate choice. That is the difference between a meeting that matters and a meeting that just happens to be on the calendar.