In Part I of this series, New Signature Modern Workplace expert and Office Explorers podcast host Kat Memenza led us through a few tips to be video-ready and engaged while using teams. For Part II, we interviewed her about Meetings and Teams options. There are a number of tools and functionalities within Teams that can elevate meeting engagement and create a collaborative environment.
- Encouraging Collaboration
It’s important during virtual meetings to make sure everyone is included and given opportunity to share thoughts and ideas. To meet this end, Kat suggests that, if you are the meeting leader, you view the list of attendees to watch when participants unmute their microphone, as this gives an indication that they have something to share. This will be even easier with new Teams updates coming. You can also use the “Raising Hand” feature to alert the group that they have something to add without interrupting or speaking over another team member.
- Tooling Tips
There are a number of handy tools that can help you get the most from your Teams meeting. Most of the individual features can be found on at the bottom center during a Teams meeting.
Left to Right:
- Timer – This feature allows you to stay on track during a presentation and ensure that your meetings don’t run over. Also, if you are presenting, you can ensure that you leave ample time for questions at the end of your meeting.
- Video – this button allows you to turn your video off and on during a meeting.
- Mute – This button allows you to mute yourself to avoid disruptive background noise. Simply unmute to add your thoughts during the meeting.
- Share Screen – This button allows you to share your screen, a specific application that is running, or a white board to collect notes.
- Ellipsis Button – There are a number of menu options under the ellipsis icon, including options for sound input/output, sound levels to ensure that you are not hurting your team members ears while speaking, access to meeting notes to capture take aways and live captions to transcript meeting events.
- Raising Hand – Have something to add, but don’t want to cut someone off or interrupt? The Raising Hand icon will alert your meeting administrator that you have a question or comment in a polite and silent manner.
- Chat – With the meting chat, you can enter comments that may not necessarily need a reply, or helpful and related file links for participants to access.
- People Menu – Within the People menu, you can view all attendees, mute all attendees, or add in new members during a meeting.
- Hang Up – When you’re all through innovating and collaborating, the hang up button ends the meeting and gets your back to your tasks. However, your chat items and meeting notes from the meetings can still be accesses within the meeting chat, found on the side panel in the Teams “chat” menu.
When you utilize the Teams tooling, you are able to engage and collaborate as a team smoother and have more control during virtual meeting sessions. It is possible to feel connected, even when you’re apart.
