10 Microsoft Teams meeting tips every user should know
This pandemic has forced everyone to adopt video conferencing for work or for our personal life. Helping us to go full remote-working, or staying connected with friends and family, having online medical consultations, therapy, classes, etc.
Your company, school or university might have already started using Microsoft collaboration solution, Microsoft Teams. In case you do, today I am going to show you my ten favorite tips for mastering your next Teams Meeting.
Disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft as a Sr. Program Manager at Teams for Education; this post isn’t intended to be a promotional or marketing post, just me sharing the top tips I’ve gathered in 3+ years of using MS Teams as my main collaboration tool while working fully remote.
Tip 1: Download the desktop or mobile client
To have the full experience of a Teams Meeting with all the newest features I strongly encourage you to download the latest Teams client from your desktop (Windows, Mac, or Linux).
The mobile client is also a great option if you want to move around your house, you can easily join simultaneously from your Desktop client and then switch or transfer the audio to your mobile device without any hiccups.
If you are feeling adventurous, try to deliver a meeting completely from your phone or tablet, you would be amazed by the power of your phone, you can even share your phone screen or PPTs without the need of a laptop.
Tip 2: Take control of your meetings
If you are a meeting organizer you might want to consider 3 key points while scheduling your meeting:
- Set the meeting options: If you booked your meeting through the Teams Calendar, be sure to re-open the meeting event in the calendar and check on the Meeting Options tab. This will let you define who will be a presenter during the meeting, if you don’t want external users crashing your private meeting you should also set the lobby options to leave any unwanted guests out of the call.
- Set up an agenda for your meeting: It has been proven that effective meetings should not last more than 45min, you should embrace this with a predefined agenda for your meeting. When scheduling the meeting be sure to take a couple of minutes to include a basic agenda in the details, so that meeting attendees have clarity on what topics will be covered. Also be sure to include any documents, PPTs or anything they should review before coming to the meeting.
2. Define a note-taker for your meeting: Taking notes on agreements or action items created during the meeting should be key to follow up and having an effective meeting with your peers or team. Feel free to randomly assign someone to the meeting to oversee taking notes of the meeting. You could add that to the description or agenda of the meeting when scheduling.
Tip 3: Video On!
One of the big challenges face during online meetings, is the lack of physical interaction between the attendees. When we turn off video in our virtual meetings, we kill the body language, eye contact, and this might also lead to people multitasking or not being fully present.
Before entering your meeting, you can privately configure your webcam settings, test out some of the default custom backgrounds or just keep it simple with the background blur. Choose the one that you like most and join the meeting.
Be sure to encourage the rest of the meeting participants to turn their video on, so you can have an inclusive meeting with everyone being “virtually present.” I know, you might not be wearing your best outfit, you might not be wearing pants, or your hair might be going crazy, but at the end we are all undergoing this new “Pandemic look”, so go ahead and don’t be afraid of showing yourself, at the end we are all on the same boat in this pandemic new normal.
BONUS TIP:
If you want to spice things up, or bring more joy and fun to your meeting you can also use external camera apps such as the Snap Camera from Snapchat, that will bring those funny snapchat filters into Microsoft Teams. Just be sure to install, follow the instructions and then select the Snap Camera from the Device Settings before joining your meeting.
Tip 4: Shortcut mastery
Once you joined your meeting you might be wanting to share your screen easily, mute your mic quickly as soon as the dog starts barking like crazy or kids randomly start screaming, for this you might want to use quick keyboard shortcuts rather than looking desperately for the mute button.
There is a bunch of shortcuts available in Teams, but here are my favorite ones for meetings:
Windows:
Mute/Unmute:
Ctrl + Shift + M
Video On/Video Off:
Ctrl + Shift + O
Go to Sharing Toolbar:
Ctrl + Shift + Space
MacOS
Mute/Unmute:
Command + Shift + M
Video On/Video Off:
Command + Shift + O
Go to Sharing Toolbar:
Command + Shift + Space
Tip 5: Manage participants
Once in the meeting, if you forgot to select the meeting options while scheduling the meeting, no worries, you are still able to change the settings on the go. Just go to the Participants tab in the meeting and click on the meeting options icon.
In case you are the meeting organizer or a presenter and want to promote or demote a presenter to an attendee, you can just click on the ellipsis and select make an attendee or make a presenter. You can change the roles at any time during the meeting.
Another effective way of keeping order through the meeting is encouraging attendees to raise their hand to request their turn to speak out, or raise their hand if they have any questions, comments, etc. This will make it easier to keep order and
Tip 6: Note Taking during the meeting
Every teams meeting has a dedicated note taking space inside the meeting, it can be accessed by anyone in the call, this space could be used by the note-taker to record any of the agreements, key points or action items. After the call is over the meeting notes can be reviewed. This could be an easy effortless way to track everything in the meeting.
If you already have a team with your teammates you might want to take it to the next level by using the OneNote notebook app inside your team. This provides even more functionalities such as bringing the meeting participants into the notes, taking notes with digital ink, making to-do lists, and having a ledger of all the meeting notes in just one place.
Remember, to keep an effective meeting, try to adhere to the original agenda, and at the end you should leave with the next steps, action items or agreements made in the call.
Tip 7: Make it easy for everyone in the call, share content!
As we transition from normal boardrooms and physical classrooms to virtual meeting rooms, we need to take advantage of the new tools to improve our communication skills.
If you are a meeting organizer or presenter, you will be able to share content in your meeting easy. Just click on the share content button and you will have a couple of options here, lets quickly review them:
- Share Desktop: This will work great if you are going to show the rest of the audience how to undergo a process that involves switching from multiple applications or windows, for example teaching a coding class or explaining a new CRM or ERP process to the rest of the team.
BEWARE: sharing all screen will share literally EVERYTHING you see in your screen, so check that no confidential information such as sticky notes with passwords, highly confidential emails, WhatsApp notifications, or any other apps are visible before you start sharing. To be honest this mode usually works better if you have a second screen that you can control. If you do not have a second screen this also works good with Windows 10 Multiple desktops or MacOS multiple spaces
2. Share a window or app: This will be the best scenario as you have complete control on what the other audience are seeing without having to close or hide anything else from your desktop. If you need to switch from one app window to another one be sure to stop sharing and share the new app you want to share. If you continuously need to change from one window to another one the easiest way would be the share all screen mode.
3. Share a PowerPoint: If you are only going to share a PPT (.ppt) deck, this one is the easiest way to go without having to worry about opening PowerPoint on your desktop or having to hide anything from the audience on your screen. You can also limit the audience to view only the slide you are presenting by disabling the private viewing mode.
Tip 8: Become a sketching master
Another content sharing choice available is the Microsoft Whiteboard. This is another handy tool that is included in Microsoft 365. With the whiteboard you could collaborate with your teammates in a virtual drawing/sketching space. And the best thing is that it is a persistent whiteboard, this means that when the meeting is over you can still go and continue reviewing or working on that space.
This becomes handy as we want to draft ideas, explain concepts or easily express ourselves.
Once you start sharing the whiteboard will ask you if you want to use the Windows App or the Teams App. I would strongly encourage you to download the desktop app as it adds a lot of extra features such as sticky notes, text boxes, templates, images, etc.
If you do not feel comfortable with the virtual whiteboard choice, or you do not have a touch enabled device, you might want to try this home-made hack. Just join the meeting additionally from your phone and get some household items to position lock your phone in place, if you have a tripod that would work even better. Then just share your camera phone and ta-da! you have a home-made content camera device to share with the rest of attendees your pen and paper sketching.
Tip 9: Real-time polling
You might want to have some real-time polling or pulse questions during your meeting. This could easily be enabled by using a free third-party app available in the meeting chat or by using the Microsoft Forms app. Just open the meeting chat, click the ellipsis and search for Polly or for Microsoft Forms.
Polly is an amazing simple app that helps you run real-time surveys and polls, it also has a payed version in case you want extra features, but the free version should work fine for simple polls and surveys in your meetings.
As you can see, Polly provides a lot of customization options to enable multiple scenarios around polls and surveys, if you just need an straightforward poll with multiple or single answers, you might want to use the Microsoft Forms app, this one is also free as it’s already included in M365.
This will add an extra level of engagement in your meeting, letting people interact or share their quick pulse through the polls you create, you can even create anonymous polls.
Tip 10: Meeting Recording, Transcription and Attendance Report
If your admin has enabled recordings for meetings, you should be able to record any meeting. Only presenters can start or stop a recording, so if you configured the meeting options before going inside your meeting you should be able to start and stop recording your meeting.
The meeting will be recorded in the cloud and stored continuously in Microsoft Stream, unless you want to remove it or download the original Mp4 file to save it elsewhere.
If you are having externals in your meeting and you want to share the recording with them as well, you will need to download the Mp4 recording and upload it into a OneDrive folder or any other cloud sharing solution for them to able to download it.
You can enable a transcription for all the audio in your recording, so you can then easily search for keywords and go to the specific minute/second where they were mentioned during the meeting. For this you just have to open the recording in stream and in the settings set the language the meeting was held in, after that you should be able to see the transcript and search through it.
Once the meeting is done, you can also get the attendance report for the meeting, this will download an excel file with all the attendee names, entry and leave timestamps.
I hope these tips help improve your online meeting effectiveness and productivity in these pandemic times. Feel free to follow me for other Teams and Microsoft 365 tips and tricks.
