Before Covid-19, we’d have in-person monthly Safety Meetings at work, with just a few people joining via conference call. This month, we offered Skype with call-in lines so team members didn’t have to show up at the office (if everyone attended, it would have been a little over 200 team members). Did it work smoothly?

Nope, not as smoothly as it could have worked, with respect to technical difficulties.

Why? Well, some of it was lack of communication on who was supposed to do what, but that’s another story that doesn’t need to be shared here. We heard that some people couldn’t hear the speaker. One of our savvy admins then logged into a laptop and used that as the speaker. Turns out the desktop we were presenting from didn’t have microphone capability. Plus, I think some of those on the receiving end didn’t have audio capability, until they also dialed in to the conference line.

I sat down with a couple of the other admins afterward and came up with a list of Lessons Learned. One of the lessons dealt with the set up and logging in to Skype (admins were responsible for dialing into the conference line, plus logging in to Skype and getting things ready on the big screen).

I don’t think the person that logged in to Skype enabled the settings beforehand. I heard a comment from someone who joined via Skype afterward that everyone was shown as a Presenter.

And at the beginning of the log-in, the admin looked at her calendar and dialed the conference line number showing there. I’m asking people on the conference line to speak up and tell me if they could hear me. No responses. No responses after a few times of asking for a sound check. Someone questioned whether the right conference line was used. I hung up and dialed the number, and bingo! People were waiting on the line for the speaker to start. We find out later that the admin who first dialed in, her calendar hadn’t been updated when the new conference line number was added to the meeting invite. What the heck, Outlook? 

Overall, our first Skype/conference call Safety Meeting wasn’t a total loss. We got through the slide deck as expected. And we’ll be sure to use the Lessons Learned before our meeting in April.

The teacher in me came out afterward: I whipped up a little Skype cheat sheet and shared it with the admins.