How to Run a Remote All-Hands

The all-hands started at 10am in San Francisco, which the calendar invite helpfully noted was also 7pm in London and 1am in Singapore. The London people half-watched from their kitchens with dinner going cold. The three engineers in Singapore didn't come. Nobody expected them to. They'd watch the recording the next day, same as last month, same as the month before, and the CEO would open with "great to see everyone" to a call that structurally could not contain everyone.

That's the quiet thing about a distributed all-hands. It's the one meeting meant to make a scattered company feel like a single thing, and it's the meeting the timezones break most completely, because you can slide a six-person sync around but you can't move everybody at once. Whatever hour you pick is the middle of someone's night.

Just record it is the right answer almost everywhere else

I've argued before that most meetings on a distributed team should be recorded and summarized so the sleeping timezone isn't shut out. A demo, a walkthrough, a postmortem: the value is the information, and information survives being watched a day later at double speed. For those, async by default isn't a compromise. It's the better format.

The all-hands is where that logic runs out. Its value isn't only the information. If all your all-hands did was convey facts, you'd be right to kill it and send a doc, because nobody needs to assemble the whole company live to hear that Q3 numbers came in fine. The meeting exists for the part that doesn't survive a recording: the room reacting to news in the same moment, the unscripted answer to a question somebody was brave enough to ask out loud, the thin sense that you can see the person running the company and they can, in some small way, see you. Watch that a day later and you get the transcript of a feeling you weren't invited to.

So the far timezone doesn't just miss information. They miss the thing the meeting was for, every single time, and they learn where they stand in the company by what hour it's held.

Pick the time like it's a decision, because it is

Most all-hands times are accidents. They get set at whatever is convenient for headquarters, usually late morning at HQ, and then frozen for two years. On a co-located company that's fine. On a distributed one it quietly encodes a hierarchy: the people who share the founders' timezone are full citizens of the company's central ritual, and everyone else is an audience for the replay.

The honest fix is the same one that works for any meeting that has to be live. Find your real overlap, admit it's probably narrow, and rotate the pain instead of parking it on the same people forever. If you run the all-hands monthly, you can afford to alternate. One month lands in the Americas' morning and Asia eats the bad slot. The next month lands in Asia's morning and the Americas get up early. Nobody loves it, which is exactly the point, because right now one group loves it and one group was never asked.

If your spread is so wide there's genuinely no hour that's humane for everyone at once, stop pretending a single live event can serve the whole company and run it twice. Two sessions, same content, two timezone-friendly slots, the CEO giving the talk a second time. That's more work for the people who should be carrying the cost, which is leadership, not the engineer in Singapore who's been taking one for the team at 1am.

Move the information out so the live hour earns its place

The other failure is all-hands bloat. The meeting swells into a parade of departmental status updates, each lead reading numbers off a slide, forty minutes of material that would land better as text. Now you've built the worst of both worlds, a meeting too dull to be worth losing sleep over and too long for anyone to comfortably sit through the recording.

Strip it. Anything that's just a status readout belongs in the written update people can read on their own clock, sent before the meeting rather than performed during it. The live hour should hold only what genuinely benefits from being live: the strategic reasoning behind the numbers, the decision that needs the founder's actual voice, the questions. If a segment could be a paragraph, make it a paragraph. What survives is short enough that running it twice, or holding it at an odd hour, stops feeling absurd.

This also rescues the recording. A tight thirty-minute all-hands is something the Singapore team might actually play. A rambling seventy-minute one is something they'll skip while telling themselves they'll catch up later, and then don't.

Make the Q&A survive a sleeping room

Live Q&A is usually the best part of an all-hands and the first thing the timezone gap wrecks, because the people awake are the only ones who get to ask. The fix is to split the asking from the answering. Open a questions doc or a channel thread a day ahead, in writing, and let people submit whether or not they'll be awake for the answer. Upvoting sorts the real questions from the polite ones. The person with the sharpest question is often the one asleep during the call, and a written queue is the only way it ever reaches the room.

Answer the submitted ones live, take spontaneous ones from whoever's present, and write up anything you didn't get to. And watch who isn't asking. On a lot of teams that span several cultures, the silence from one region isn't contentment. It's some mix of a bad hour and a norm where you don't challenge leadership in a public room. A written queue, anonymous if you let it be, pulls in questions a live mic never would.

The recording is a different thing, so design it on purpose

The person watching tomorrow isn't attending a slightly worse all-hands. They're doing something else entirely, alone, after the fact, and most companies hand them a raw ninety-minute video with no timestamps and call it inclusion. Nobody watches that.

Give the async audience their own version. A short written recap of the actual news and decisions, posted the same day. Timestamps on the recording so a person can jump to the two parts they care about. The answers to the questions, the ones asked live included, written down somewhere everyone can find them. Done well, the replay is occasionally better than being there, because it's skimmable and searchable in a way the live hour never is. The failure was never that a recording exists. It's pretending the recording is the same experience, then doing nothing to make it a good one.

What the all-hands is actually protecting

The reason to fuss over any of this is that the all-hands is one of the few moments a distributed company is deliberately all in one place. That matters more the more spread out you are, because the far-timezone people are already carrying a low hum of being the only one in their timezone, slightly outside every default. If the one ritual meant to push back on that is itself held at an hour that excludes them, you've taken the loneliest seat in the company and confirmed its occupant was right to feel that way.

You don't fix belonging with a monthly meeting. That work lives in the daily texture of how the team operates, not in an hour on a calendar. But you can absolutely damage it with a monthly meeting that always, reliably leaves the same people out. Run the all-hands so that a year from now the person in Singapore has been in the room about as often as the person who lives down the street from the office. That's a low bar. Most companies miss it anyway.

Let Timely Handle the Clock Math

An all-hands invite that just says "10am" is a small act of exclusion when half the company has to stop and work out what that means for them. Timely reads each person's Slack timezone and converts every time you mention into their own local clock, so when you announce the next all-hands, the people in Berlin and Singapore see their own time without the arithmetic. It won't pick a fair hour for you, but it makes sure nobody misreads the one you chose.

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