April 2022 was a very special month for us here at Accent Computer Solutions. We had our first in-person All Hands meeting since February 2020!
For at least 10 years prior to the pandemic, our local employees would gather for our monthly get-together at the office. I’m sure most people did not fancy getting up earlier than usual to travel to Rancho Cucamonga for a 7:30 am meeting, but it was an awesome experience once we were all gathered together.
Missed In-Person Conversations That Connect People
Getting to see and visit with our team is always a good time. In our day-to-day, we chat and joke around, but everyone is so focused on what we’re doing -- working on projects and issues, buried in monitors investigating IT challenges -- that we don’t always take time to have the conversations that really connect us.
We missed that.
In February, we started to think that getting together in person would be possible once again. So we toiled over the concept, then tip-toed into a plan that would allow us to reconvene the way we used to and give our remote workers a good experience.
Technology Prepared for In-Person + Live-Stream Meeting
Having a full-blown in-person event that is also live-streamed to remote folks can be quite a challenge.
Our first step was to dust off the multimedia equipment cart we had put together a few years ago. Who knew if the laptops, speakers, microphones, and other equipment would still work?
Then the Marketing Team and a few of our media wizards experimented to see what would happen when we plugged it all in. After running two years' worth of Windows updates on a computer that hadn't been turned on since March 2020, they got everything all worked out.
Microsoft Teams was the logical choice for our All Hands meeting platform. Teams has been our live meeting application of choice since it was introduced long before the pandemic. We now use Teams exclusively for internal and external communications since we recently decommissioned our phone system. (That’s right. We no longer have a traditional phone system!)
Great Event Experience and Breakfast Burritos
The event was held two weeks ago in our cool industrial warehouse that we converted into office space. I am proud to say that our team made it look like pulling all the pieces together to make it happen was no problem at all! The in-person and remote experience were fantastic (and so were the breakfast burritos.)
I want to give a shout-out to Barry and Jason for working so hard to pull this off after such a long hiatus.
Nothing that we do here at Accent is possible without the individual contributions that every person makes every day. I am very thankful for our whole team of dedicated professionals.
Thank you, Team Accent!
Marty
