At each level of management, you can probably reduce the cadence of formal communications:
1. Direct team lead (including leadership of very small start-ups) - weekly or biweekly, depending on how many interesting things you normally have to share
2. Director/manager-of-managers - monthly, again conditional on having enough interesting things to share
3. VP and above/leadership of 100+ person company - quarterly
It's critical that you actually have interesting content, data, or strategy to share, and it's worth putting effort into gathering this content and presenting it in a compelling way. A common anti-pattern is to have regular all-hands meetings with boring or repetitive content, which causes people to zone out or look for reasons to skip it so they can get their work done instead.
It can be hard to identify this, because the bored people won't respond to surveys, or won't respond honestly. A good rule-of-thumb would be that if you're not spending at least a couple hours prepping for the meeting, then it's probably not worth having.
I like the reasoning here but don’t you think that senior leadership only communicating once a quarter (your example of 100+ employees) seems a bit out of touch and all the risks that entails?
Once/quarter is for "broadcast" communication - all-hands meetings, email newsletters, etc. In addition to that, they should be engaging with each individual team that reports to them. For example, you might also find it useful to do quarterly team-level strategy reviews where the team presents their accomplishments from the previous quarter and discusses their team-level roadmap for the next quarter.
At the same time, senior leadership needs to get used to being "out-of-touch" to some extent. Most people who are new to senior leadership make the opposite mistake, and are far too involved in details of execution that they should have fully delegated. Too much direct involvement can deprive your managers of opportunities to take initiative and grow in their careers.
1. Direct team lead (including leadership of very small start-ups) - weekly or biweekly, depending on how many interesting things you normally have to share
2. Director/manager-of-managers - monthly, again conditional on having enough interesting things to share
3. VP and above/leadership of 100+ person company - quarterly
It's critical that you actually have interesting content, data, or strategy to share, and it's worth putting effort into gathering this content and presenting it in a compelling way. A common anti-pattern is to have regular all-hands meetings with boring or repetitive content, which causes people to zone out or look for reasons to skip it so they can get their work done instead.
It can be hard to identify this, because the bored people won't respond to surveys, or won't respond honestly. A good rule-of-thumb would be that if you're not spending at least a couple hours prepping for the meeting, then it's probably not worth having.