17 Creative Annual Company Meeting Ideas & Activities

Here is a list of the best annual company meeting ideas and activities.

Annual company meetings ideas are ways to engage staff during yearly companywide gatherings. Examples include budgeting brainstorms, innovation imagination sessions, and speed hackathons. These exercises improve collaboration and activity and keep audiences engaged and entertained throughout the event.

These gatherings are similar to all-hands meetings, company retreats, and conference breakout sessions.

This list includes:

• fun company meeting ideas
• annual company meeting topics
• yearly company meeting activities
• games for yearly meetings

Let’s get started!

List of annual company meeting ideas and activities

From innovative imagination sessions to office charades and office Bingo, here is a list of the company meeting ideas.

1. Budgeting Brainstorms

Budgets are standard annual company meeting topics. During many company summits, leaders announce the budget for the coming year, review spending from the past year, and break down budgets monthly, quarterly, or departmentally. These conversations help executives and employees understand a company’s financial standing and be more conscious of spending. The conversations can help workers avoid excess expenses and identify operational areas that need more funding.

Discussing budgets doesn’t have to be a long and boring affair. You can make budgeting fun by making the members of staff active participants in the budgeting process.

For this event:

1. Present the attendees with all financial records for the current business year through a slide show.
2. Split the teammates into groups and each group has to develop effective budget-saving ideas.
3. The teams will present these ideas to the company’s representatives.
4. The teammates have to highlight the pros and cons of their ideas and be ready to help apply these ideas in the office.
5. The representatives will review these ideas and choose the best.

This activity ensures that members can consider cost and budgeting when making decisions for the company. Your employees will also enjoy this event as they will get the opportunity to share innovative ideas and interact with teammates.

2. Innovative Imagination Sessions

There is always room for innovation. Therefore, professionals should get opportunities to share their innovative ideas and unique discoveries. Innovative sessions make the best yearly company meeting activities because these exercises allow employees to show off their skills and interact with like-minded teammates. Remote teams can also host innovative sessions on Zoom or via Google Meet.

To organize innovative sessions at the office:

1. Split the attendees into groups.
2. Each group gets an hour to come up with any idea that may benefit different business sectors. For example, the groups may decide to redesign the company’s logo, come up with a short ad for the company’s media pages or develop new, marketing strategies for a new product or service.
3. The company’s representatives will review these ideas and choose the top three.
4. The company can then apply these ideas to the business and give due credit to the brains behind these innovative ideas.

The innovative sessions allow members of staff to tackle challenges or develop new ideas that may help to achieve the company’s goals. Innovative sessions result in productive meetings and also provide an opportunity for the staff to work as a team, thereby enhancing their team spirit. Everyone at the meeting gets to work on various skills, such as leading, creating, and practicing collaboration while having fun.

Here is a list of books on innovation.

3. Brunch and Learn

Brunch meetings make a good company meeting idea. To organize this event, you will need a comfortable space, preferably the office conference room or a restaurant close to the office.

At this event, you can:

• brainstorm ways to improve employee wellness
• foster collaborative creativity with mini projects
• train attendees on the use of a new software
• talk through company issues and case studies
• listen to speakers talk about subjects like allyship, financial planning, and time management
• announce upcoming changes to the company policies and procedures

You can order various meals and snacks for attendees to enjoy during the meeting or allow the teammates to order what they like. This activity sets an informal meeting environment that allows teammates to relax. Brunch is also a great way for teammates to feel refreshed during these meetings.

Similarly, here is a list of virtual lunch and learn ideas.

4. Annual Meeting Charades

Charades are fun company meeting ideas that can re-energize groups and liven up long presentations. The teammates can play charades after the meeting or even during a short break.

To play:

1. Players break into groups.
2. Each group chooses a representative.
3. The representative receives a prompt.
4. The representative acts out these prompts without speaking while other teammates try to guess the item.
5. Players only have a limited amount of time to guess the prompt each round, ideally three minutes or less.

Some examples of prompt ideas include office activities like making copies, brewing coffee, and reacting to malfunctioning computers. Even better, you can theme the prompts around organizational events that happened within the past year, for example, making your millionth sale or launching a new location.

For extra fun, make Charades a competition and pit managers against employees or department against department. The teams who express their prompts most clearly and guess the most correct number of answers in the shortest amount of time will win a prize.

Here is a charades generator for inspiration.

5. Speedy Hackathons

Hackathons are opportunities for managers, designers, and project managers to collaborate intensively on spontaneous projects. Hackathons are often brain-racking and a good way to build the spirit of teamwork. For this reason, speedy hackathons make excellent annual company meeting activities.

Speedy hackathons make yearly meetings more exciting. You can split attendees into groups and each group gets to brainstorm a solution to a problem or build a prototype. This exercise originated in the software world as a way to develop new apps, programs, and products. However, you can also assign more general tasks like designing a new logo, label, or motto for the company. This activity will keep attendees busy and engaged. At the end of the exercise, teams will present their products, and judges will choose a winner.

Here is a guide to doing virtual hackathons.

6. Team Win Pep Rally

Beginning meetings on a good note makes the meeting more relaxing and enjoyable. Discussing a win can sometimes be all the encouragement team members need to do even better. This activity highlights the achievements of important members of staff, offers recognition for team wins, and encourages other members of staff to put in their best efforts in the coming business year.

During this event:

• announce a new member of staff or the staff of the year
• acknowledge employees or members of staff who have helped the company secure projects or contracts in the last year
• give honorary awards if necessary
• show a slideshow so that staff can place faces to wins
• encourage the crowd to cheer and hive five staff. feel free to pass out noisemakers to make the applause more momentous

This activity aims to acknowledge team efforts and individual achievements with a swell of crowd support.

Check out more employee recognition ideas.

7. Annual Meeting Bingo

It is important to keep attendees entertained during annual company meetings. Games are the best way to break the ice. Annual Meeting Bingo is one of the best games for yearly meetings. To play, you need to create Bingo cards.

Here is a template we made for your game:

Everyone at the meeting gets to engage in this activity and you get to know how well your employees know each other. Mingling to find folks who fit the descriptions will also help employees learn more about each other. Those players with the highest correct guesses can get to pick the next game or get a reward for their good observatory skills.

For more game options, check out this Icebreaker Bingo generator.

8. Show and Tell

Starting a meeting on a light note is a good idea, and a show and tell is ideal to begin your meeting in the right tone. This activity allows staff members to tell each other something new about themselves. During the meeting, you can encourage employees to show a special item and explain its significance. Attendees can get to show a funny or hilarious comment from a client, an office tool that came in handy, or a snack that fueled the teammates through their work that year.

This activity is a good way to learn more about coworkers. A show and tell is a good game for yearly meetings. Asides from the fun, you get to know more about the other person. However, if you expect participants to show objects, then give guests a heads-up pre-meeting so that they can bring these items to the meeting space!

9. Company Event Previews

Annual meetings are great opportunities to share plans for upcoming company events. This idea is important because it allows team members to plan accordingly and can boost turnout for upcoming gatherings. The teammates can also suggest activities and events that can be included in the company’s calendar. For example, employees may suggest that the company includes a single fun fair day for the company’s staff in the calendar. The company’s representative may share the details of the events that have already been highlighted for the coming business year and give employees a chance to offer suggestions or contributions.

To give the teammates a chance to visualize these events, the representative can set up a slide or screen to show the teammates how these events were planned, the budget set aside for each, and even discuss potential venues. Examples of these events include business conferences, office parties, and trade shows. Members who intend to give their input can share their concerns and help those in charge of the event to plan better.

Pro tip: Provide a calendar so that team members can keep track of these events.

Here is a list of team building event ideas.

10. Evaluation Stations

Evaluations are appraisals of the year’s projects, activities, and events. You can also assess teams, departments, sub-departments, and other sub-divisions within the company.

One great idea during yearly company events is to set up stations where employees can leave feedback and gain performance summaries of different parts of the company. For example, you can set up suggestion boxes where team members can pass along ideas and constructive criticism or praise for their peers. You can also turn the reports into a fun game by asking attendees to fill out a “pop quiz” with questions about these presentations, and awarding prizes to folks who complete this activity.

These stations are a great space to set up surveys and run mini-focus groups. You can set up these stations in common areas and attendees can visit the tables and review the data during breaks.

Pro tip: Capture attendees’ attention and incentive participation by including swag and snacks.

11. Guess the Metrics

Annual meetings are an avenue to look through the company’s metrics. Presenters often go over numbers in areas such as company sales, revenue, new client acquisition, social media insights, customer satisfaction scores, and new product launches. This review helps employees understand the company’s recent performance and brainstorm ways to be better. These conversations also help employees understand and set upcoming strategies.

Rather than announce numbers the traditional way of graphs on PowerPoint slides, you can turn these reviews into a fun and interactive game show activity. For example, you can draw inspiration from The Price is Right by playing a “closest without going over” challenge.

For this activity, teammates must guess the closest figures for the metrics without going over the actual number. You can give a prize to the most accurate guesser each round.

This activity gets employees involved and engaged in company performance and are a fun way to go over normally dry information.

12. Kahoot Trivia

Kahoot is a game-based learning platform that brings engagement and fun. Playing Kahoot is a fun company meeting idea for employee engagement. By entering answering on their mobile devices, participants can race to respond to quiz questions about work or non-work topics. Simply create the quiz pre-meeting, then have participants enter a code on their mobile devices to join the room. Be sure to display the questions large screen so that the group can play along in real time.

Questions such as team members’ birthdays, important dates in the office, or company history can be good game material for company meetings. Spellings of industry terms or employee names can also be in the Kahoot games. This exercise is a perfect blend of productivity and fun. Playing Kahoot is a good way to end the annual company meeting, as the game keeps attendees happy and relaxed at the end of the day.

Here are more quiz game apps and tools.

13. Question and Answer Sessions

Question and answer sessions are good opportunities for team members, especially new hires, to ask questions about the company. The session can address questions about team tasks, new company concepts, business strategies, or upcoming organizational changes, for instance.

To organize a Q and A session:

1. Encourage all staff members to drop any questions they may have in a suggestion box or on a digital form.
2. Screen through the questions and pick the most important inquiries or look out for frequently-asked questions.
3. Have attendees sit facing the speakers. If allowing on-the-spot questions, then be sure to have a microphone ready for the audience.
4. One by one, address employee questions. Feel free to use visual aids to illustrate points and list answer highlights.

The question and answer question will help employees align with the company’s goals and give the teammates clarity on the company’s expectations. This meeting also helps team members prepare better for the next business year. To make the most of this activity, take notes and email a conversation summary to the meeting participants after the fact.

14. Guest Speakers

Inviting a guest speaker is a great annual company meeting idea. The guest speaker could be a well-known businessman in the industry, a motivational speaker, or a TED talk professional. Whoever the company chooses should be an important figure who will give value through speech.

You can also encourage the speaker to use PowerPoint to share unimportant data and facts, as some employees may need audio-visual learning to completely understand what is being said. It is important to ensure that attendees get the slides at the end of the speech to aid them in their research and know the topics discussed at the meeting.

Here is a list of virtual keynote speakers.

15. Stars of the Year

Good work deserves applause, and when you recognize your team’s efforts, your teammates will give more exemplary work. It is important to recognize employees who had distinguished themselves in the business year. This recognition will encourage all members of staff to keep up the great work and also encourage other teammates to do better so they can receive recognition as well.

For example, you can project photos and profiles of the stars of the year on the screen during the meeting so that all attendees can get to see and appreciate their teammates for a job well done. Or, you can setup a makeshift “hall of fame” near the meeting space with photos and short profiles of standout team members. Another simple gesture is to place stars on the nametags of top performers and contributors to identify the star employees at the gathering.

Offering appropriate recognition makes the teammates realize that they are adding value to the company, and that the team’s efforts are not in vain.

For similar initiatives, check out employee of the month ideas.

16. Customer Roses and Thorns

Customer Roses and Thorns is one of the most helpful yearly meeting activities. This exercise shares customer success stories and pain points and challenges team members to think about what comprises an optimal customer experience.

For this activity, you can prepare positive and negative reviews. Be sure that critical reviews do not contain employee names, however, feel free to keep names in positive reviews to give team members well-deserved shout-outs. You can treat each review like a case study and have the group discuss what the employee did well and what they could have done better. This activity pinpoints the root causes of issues and helps employees set standards. Even when presented with positive reviews, employees can brainstorm ways to do even better.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to see the impact of the work that is being done or to spot the wrongs from an insider’s point of view. A customer’s success story or criticism is important, and sharing it at an annual meeting makes it much more useful to the growth of the company as a whole. The customer’s feedback can be projected in a large conference room for all the employees to see. At this meeting, the employees will need to offer suggestions to solve or deal with these complaints or feedback. They may also suggest long-lasting solutions to these problems, to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

17. Guess the Picture

One of the simplest ideas for yearly meetings is to create a slideshow of the year in review. Rather than present the pictures one by one, you can turn this activity into a fun game.

To play, show slides of photographs without any context. Then, have team members jot down the event the picture commemorates. Players have up to thirty seconds to guess and can converse with coworkers sitting nearby. At the end of the activity, go over the answers, elaborate on each event, and award correct guesses with candy.

To make the exercise more interactive, ask each department to submit a photo.

Guess the picture is a beautiful and emotional way to relive the year and share fun experiences as a team. This activity is often an amazing way to bring the annual meeting to a close. Looking through the slide show gives attendees an insight into all they have been able to achieve as a team for that business year. This exercise serves as a reassurance and a boost to their momentum to do more and do better. Reflecting on good times has an unexplainable effect and a great advantage to work attitude come next business year. This is a yearly company meeting activity idea.

Conclusion

Annual company meetings are a time to gather the entire organization, address key points, and make important announcements. This meeting aims to checkmate progress, vote on pending company issues, make new strategies or improve on existing operations.

Annual company meetings give employees a chance to meet with the main supervisors of a company, show their progress over a certain period, and discuss issues that may be affecting the business. These events allow employees to see how well they have done in the last year and discuss ways to improve in the coming year. Not to mention, these occasions are great opportunities for colleagues to connect, bond, and gain a wider sense of belonging.

Next, check out leadership conferences and HR conferences.