Internal live streaming: how to run a town hall people watch

In 2019, Sundar Pichai told Google staff that only about 25% of them watched TGIF, the company's all-hands meeting. A decade earlier it had been 80%.

Internal live streaming means broadcasting town halls, leadership updates and company-wide events to employees as they happen, wherever they work. For organisations with offices in several countries, it's often the only way to put a leader in front of everyone at once and let them ask questions back.

Most companies running it meet a smaller version of Google's problem. Getting a town hall onto screens in 20 offices is the easy part. Getting people in those offices to watch, ask something real and leave knowing what changed is harder.

Give each company town hall one job

Pichai's explanation was simple. People came to TGIF wanting different things. Some wanted product news and strategy, others wanted answers on how the company was being run, and a weekly meeting trying to do both was doing neither well.

Google's fix was to split them. TGIF became a monthly meeting on product and business strategy, and separate town halls took the workplace issues.

That's a useful test for any company town hall. If you can't say in one sentence what this stream is for, your employees can't either, and they'll skip it.

It matters more now because managers are struggling to carry the message down. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% in a single year. A stream is one of the few places where employees hear leaders directly, without anything lost in the retelling. So it has to be worth their hour.

Let the hard questions through

A live Q&A is the reason to stream a virtual town hall instead of sending a video. It's also the part most companies get wrong.

In 2023, fewer than 1% of Google employees asked a question at TGIF. Google replaced its old upvoting tool with an AI system that groups similar questions and summarises them. The company says twice as many people now ask and vote. Staff told Business Insider the summaries take the sting out of the questions, and several said they rarely attend now.

Zoom had a different problem. At an all-hands in August 2023, CEO Eric Yuan told staff they had to be in the office at least two days a week. His reason was that people can't debate each other well on a Zoom call because everyone's too friendly.

Employees can tell when a question has been softened, and cameras make people polite. Some fixes:

• Collect questions a few days ahead, and let people ask anonymously.
• Show the question on screen as it was written, not a summary of it.
• Give the host permission to put the awkward one first.
• Follow up in writing on anything that didn't get answered live.

And assume the recording will get out. Say nothing on an internal stream you wouldn't want read back to you in an email.

Decide who runs the room before you go live

In December 2020, Handforth Parish Council in Cheshire, England, met on a video call. It opened with a councillor muttering an expletive and got worse from there. Jackie Weaver, chief officer of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils, had been brought in to help run it, which is part of her job advising parish councils. The chairman told her she had "no authority here". She moved him to the waiting room.

The vice-chair then declared "I take charge" and told everyone to read the standing orders. The removed chairman turned out to have renamed himself "clerk" on screen. Weaver asked to be called Britney Spears from then on. Across 80 minutes of the call, the one thing nobody could settle was who was in charge. Weaver later admitted she wasn't sure either.

Cheshire East Council spent more than £85,000 investigating the parish council's fight. Its reports, published more than a year later, found Weaver didn't have the authority to mute and remove councillors, though they understood why she'd done it.

A company town hall is unlikely to reach that level. But the same question comes up in smaller ways: who cuts off a speaker who's running long, who drops a question that's turned personal, who decides to pause the stream if something goes wrong. Write it down before the day. The host, the producer and the most senior person on screen should all have read it.

What not to live stream to employees

In December 2021, Better.com's CEO Vishal Garg opened a video call by telling the people on it that they'd been laid off. About 900 employees, around 9% of the company, lost their jobs weeks before Christmas. One of them told the Daily Beast the call lasted three minutes, tops.

Someone recorded it, and it went viral. A week later Garg wrote to staff that he'd blundered the execution and made a difficult situation worse.

A broadcast is built for reach, and reach is the wrong tool for telling someone they've lost their job. People affected by a decision need to hear it from their manager, in a conversation where they can react. The stream comes afterwards, for everyone else, to explain what happened, why, and what it means for the people still there.

That order applies well beyond layoffs. Restructures, office closures and leadership changes all go better when the people most affected hear first and in private.

GitLab: decide what goes on screen, then stick to it

GitLab, the software company, runs "public by default". It posts many of its internal meetings to a YouTube channel called GitLab Unfiltered: product meetings, marketing meetings, workshops.

This has had an unexpected side effect. One routine product team meeting from 2019 had 274,000 views by early 2024, mostly from people who play it to look busy. Commenters use it to hide from their children, their flatmates and, in one case, parents who hadn't been told they'd quit their job.

The policy also held on GitLab's worst day. In January 2017, an engineer accidentally deleted a large part of the production database, and the team found that none of its five backup routines worked properly. GitLab published its working notes and livestreamed the recovery on YouTube. More than 2,000 people watched.

Afterwards, GitLab wrote the livestream into its incident procedures, so every major outage would be broadcast. CEO Sid Sijbrandij said people were more understanding because they could see why it happened and what the team was doing about it. The engineer who made the mistake kept his job.

Most companies won't stream their meetings to the whole internet, and they shouldn't feel they have to. What GitLab gets right is simpler. It decided in advance what would be shown and to whom, and it didn't switch the camera off when things got awkward.

Plan internal live streaming around what needs to be live

Not every minute of a town hall has to go out live. Our guide to pre-recording versus livestreaming covers the trade-offs. For corporate live streaming aimed at employees, a simple split works:

• Record anything that has to be exactly right, such as results, policy changes and anything legal has signed off. You can caption and translate it properly for offices in different markets.
• Keep live the parts that only work live: the announcement, the Q&A, and a leader's answer to a question they didn't see coming.
• Plan the replay for colleagues in other time zones, with the Q&A marked so they can skip straight to it, and cut it into shorter clips for anyone who won't sit through the full hour.

Live streaming for business gets harder when the business spans several countries. A town hall that starts at 9am in Singapore starts at 5am in Dubai, so somebody always watches the replay, or watches half asleep. One option is to run the live session twice. Another is to hold the Q&A at a time that suits the market sending the most questions.

Language is the other gap. A leader speaking English to offices in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Riyadh relies on captions or interpretation to carry the message. Live captions help everyone, including people watching on mute in an open-plan office. People also ask better questions in their first language, so a local host in each market can collect them, translate them and put them forward.

The technical side still matters. If a stream freezes for ten minutes in front of 2,000 employees, that's more than 300 hours of the company's time gone, and the first question in the Q&A will be about the freeze. Rehearse with every speaker, test the connection from every office, and have a backup ready.

Click2View produces live streaming and video for internal communications teams across Asia. If your town halls reach every office but not every employee, talk to us.