"Can you hear me now?"
These five words can derail your meeting. But a little prep goes a long way.
What if you tested your setup five minutes before the meeting starts?
Check your mic, camera and internet connection. Have backup plans ready as well. Hopefully the meeting is setup up with some alternative ways to connect. Maybe a phone number for dial-in. If your internet is unstable, maybe you can hotspot from your phone.
Sometimes though, there's nothing you can do and issues hit when you least expect them. It happened to me just this morning, when I started phasing out and glitching on Zoom. I quickly turned off my video and apologised in the chat. "Video cutting out, switching it off for now" works better than disappearing without explanation.
Tech issues inevitably happen. The more you can do to keep things moving forward instead of having everyone wait around for you, the better.
If you're in charge of creating and managing the meeting, always provide multiple ways to participate. Some people rely on captions and some participants might need to dial in by phone rather than use video platforms.
Technology isn't perfect and neither are we. That's okay.
When nothing works, it's better to not connect at all, than to join just to fumble your way through it, constantly asking others to repeat what they've said and derail the meeting because you weren't ready. It's okay not to join. Trust me, the others will appreciate it.
I realise these things sound so much like common sense. But I've been in enough meetings where people absolutely insisted on letting everyone know how shitty their connection was. Nothing good came out of those meetings.