[Expert Hours] Join us on March 20th: Maximize Time Off While Ensuring Legal Compliance Register Now

Table Of Contents

Run Effective Meetings in Microsoft Teams

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Table Of Contents

Have you recently made the move to holding meetings in Microsoft Teams? Is your organization considering making the switch to Microsoft Teams in the near future?

If so, you are probably interested in finding out how to make the best use of this collaboration tool. To run effective meetings in Microsoft Teams, or in any other application, takes practice.

In today’s article, we will go over some tips for running successful meetings in Microsoft Teams.

How To Schedule A Meeting In Teams?

At the very start, you need to open up Teams. Once in Microsoft Teams, simply click the Meeting feature/button to schedule a Meeting. You will be prompted to invite attendees to your meeting. You can add them individually, or select an entire channel. Like in Outlook for Office 365, the application offers a Scheduling assistant, which displays everyone’s availability. Select a time that works for all or most attendees, and you’re done!

How To Run Effective Meetings In Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams developers regularly release new features that help to host more productive meetings. Indeed, their objective is to outrank Slack as the ultimate team collaboration tool.

Use Audio Conferencing

One of these updates is Audio Conferencing. When employees are on the road and a weak Wi-Fi signal or none at all, Audio Conferencing is the answer. With this new feature, there is no reason for anyone to miss another Teams meet-up.

Indeed, team members who want to benefit from Audio Conferencing can enable this feature in their meeting invites. Hence, they will automatically see dial-in instructions added to the meetings they create in Teams. The provided dial-in numbers are supported in over 90 countries and in over 400 cities. Once the call is placed, there is 44 interactive voice response (IVR) languages to guide the users through the dial-in process.

Moreover, this feature allows anyone to participate in a Microsoft Teams meeting. The Audio Conferencing feature allows anonymous users to join. They can join via the dial-in number. Indeed, this means that attendees from outside of your organization can join your Teams meetings. As long as they have a valid email address, they can join. They do not need to be a part of your organization.

In short, if you’re trying to run effective meetings in Microsoft Teams, consider sending Audio Conferencing invites.

Make Use Of The Meeting “Lobby”

When admitting people from outside of the organization on a Teams call, you can admit them from the virtual Lobby.

Indeed, attendees from outside of the organization might be clients, investors, potential clients, etc. Therefore, you might want to have some extra time to prepare as a team before starting the call. Preparation is key to running effective meetings in Microsoft Teams.

By default, all external guests on your call will arrive in a virtual lobby. The meeting’s owner will have to let them into the call. This conserves the Team’s privacy.

Nevertheless, it’s possible to disable this feature and allow anyone, even anonymous users to join the call directly without passing through the virtual lobby.

Get Rid Of Background Noise

Have you ever been on a call or online meeting with a large group of people? Were there a lot of distractions and background noise?

Anything from crying babies to barking dogs, to car engine noises or chewing, can easily disrupt a group meeting. In Microsoft Teams, for any meeting with over 5 attendees, anyone who joins in after the meeting has already started will be automatically muted.

However, as the discussion or meeting progresses certain people can become unmuted. In these instances, it is entirely acceptable to mute the individual, or to mute everyone, from the roster. To do so, as the meeting manager, you can head to your meeting roster and select ‘Mute all’.

The organizer of the Teams meeting has this right and this feature is made just for that. Certainly, users can unmute themselves at any time if they need to speak their minds. When the ‘Mute all’ option is selected, everyone on the call gets a notification. It’s a fair and transparent system.

Screen Sharing Do’s and Don’ts

If you have a million tabs open in Safari or just have a very messy desktop, you probably should clean that up before running a meeting.

Of course, you might not be willing to close all those tabs. If you don’t want to appear disorganized on a video call with screen sharing, Microsoft Teams offers a few simple solutions. In order to share only the essential information from your screen, you can use Application sharing.

This feature allows meeting leaders to share only specific windows instead of their entire screens. Conveniently, it also hides any notifications that may pop up on your screen while you’re presenting.

Last but not least, as you’re Application Sharing, you can hand over control of your screen to another meeting attendee. This is especially useful when reviewing documents or sharing ideas. Also, at any point in a presentation, another user can request control of your screen.

There are many more ways to run effective meetings in Microsoft Teams. Their official community site is an excellent resource for tips and tricks.

Run Effective Meetings in Microsoft Teams

Kristina Ousmanova
Kristina Ousmanova

Kristina recently left behind fast-paced life of Human Resource Business Consulting to freelance as a Content Writer. A regular Vacation Tracker contributor, she can be found working remotely from her home in Montreal, usually while eating a variety of snacks.

3 Best Tracksmart Alternative Software

3 Best Tracksmart Alternative Software

Read more
Guide to Implementing a Mandatory Vacation Policy in Your Company

Guide to Implementing a Mandatory Vacation Policy in Your Company

Read more
Creating a Fair and Effective PTO Buyback Policy for Your Company

Creating a Fair and Effective PTO Buyback Policy for Your Company

Read more

Do you want to simplify PTO tracking?

Schedule a free consultation with our team to learn how Vacation Tracker can help you.

Request a demo