Microsoft has been tweaking Teams over the last few months, and we think they’ve greatly improved it. From custom backgrounds to easy file sharing, there’s so much more you can do with Teams now, compared to a year ago and compared to other communication apps.
With the improvements made to Teams, here are 5 ways you can make Teams meetings more engaging – whether speaking with colleagues or clients.
1. Variety
They say that variety is the spice of life. So why not spice up your regular Teams meetings by mixing up the flavour once in a while? Recurring meetings can start to feel stale after a while, especially if the occurrence is very regular. If the same person always runs the meeting, why not ask others in the team to host on occasion? They can put their own spin on the meeting – they may have ideas others want to adopt.
2. Breakout Rooms
One of the most useful features added into Microsoft Teams last year was breakout rooms. We’ve covered breakout rooms in another article but essentially they allow you to split up your meeting elect participants speak with just smaller groups rather than all attendees. Only the meeting organiser has access to the breakout rooms, so a meeting cannot be interrupted by attendees going rogue and starting breakout rooms!
3. Forms
To increase engagement in your meetings, have you tried Microsoft Forms? Set up forms before a meeting starts and launch them during the meeting when you’re ready. If you’re hosting an event for example with attendees coming to you to learn something, why not include short surveys throughout to gauge audience understanding and knowledge of what you’ve told them. This is particularly useful we think when you have got a large audience and it’s not practical for everybody to unmute themselves and speak.
4. Reactions
During a Teams meeting, you now have the ability to react to something somebody has just said whether you want to give them a thumbs up a love heart or a round of applause this is all possible in a Teams meeting. In fact this author presented to the entire business the other week and it was great to see such positive reactions whilst speaking from colleagues.
5. Make it fun
Do you find you spend more time in meetings than you ever used to? We find that what would once have been a quick conversation from one side of the office to another often turns into a more long winded meeting. As a result, meeting fatigue can set in quite quickly. We try and look for ways to make internal catch ups a little bit more fun whether that’s who can set the best background or who’s having the best lunch!
Microsoft Teams offers an awful lot more than just communication. We find that the majority of our work gets done on and through teams. If you’d like to see how you can get more out of Microsoft Teams, why not checkout our Teams training hub where you can learn all sorts of tips and tricks in Microsoft’s communication and collaboration platform.
