Shirley Chong Human resources manager California Fitness
This happened when I was conducting a staff induction program with about 35 new hires. My regional HR manager from Hong Kong, who was visiting Singapore, was at the session with me to meet up with the new hires. My vice president was also there to give a speech.
We were at the studio room setting up the projector, computer, audio system, catering etc. When the session was about to start, I tried to play the slides but nothing appeared. I panicked and looked around for my IT colleague, who was supposed to assist me on the set-up, but was nowhere to be found. I apologised to the audience and immediately phoned him. Turned out he went for his lunch. I was so mad that I "commanded" him to return at once. Luckily, he was just at the opposite building.
While waiting for him to fix the technical problem, I quickly tweaked the situation by getting the audience to do some self-introduction and a little mingling. Then, I introduced our vice president so he could give his speech and proceed to his next meeting. Just as he finished, the PowerPoint got fixed just in time for me to continue with the session.
The "unfortunate" incident and the presence of my superiors already made me extremely nervous. I thought the day was bad enough until it came to our company video. There were images but guess what? The sound system was not working! While my IT colleague fixed the problem, I invited the audience to help themselves with the food. My excuse was ‘oh we understand that all of you must be hungry’.
Although everything went quite smoothly as there were laughter when the soft-spoken ones who were too shy with the microphone got teased by others, I still wasn't very satisfied with my performance. Maybe it was due to the two hiccups earlier, plus I stuttered during my presentation as I was feeling very embarrassed yet I have to pretend that things are OK.
At the end, people were coming to thank me for the session and staff from different branches mingled with each other sharing their workplace encounters. I even saw some exchanging contact numbers so it was a happy ending.
In retrospect, it was somewhat my fault as I took things for granted. I relied too much on my colleague and assumed my duty was just to do the presentation. My advice is whenever you have a presentation, be early and take an extra step do a test run for all the IT equipment. Never ever take things for granted and always communicate with your team. Hopefully you can avoid what I went through.
