Teams meetings – get set up for success

Matthew shares his basics for setting up great Microsoft Teams meetings

Reading time: 4 minutes

I’ve been a heavy user of Microsoft Teams for meeting experiences over the last few years, personally I like it, perhaps it doesn’t come with all the glossy things that some online gathering tools provide, but the job that it does, it does pretty well.

When I talk to people who seem to struggle with Teams meetings, I often take a little bit of time just to explain a few of the basics. It’s common, but not generally a surprise considering very few of us went on a course before we started using Teams, that a few things have been lost in time.

If you’re new to hosting meetings in Teams or trying to improve your performance, here are four key things I think you should know about to help you create great meeting experiences.

1. Meetings happen between people

That sounds simple, what I mean, is that Teams expects everyone in the meeting to be a person joining using their IT account. Where I’ve become unstuck is when a meeting has been scheduled from a shared mailbox, primarily because there isn’t a real person in the meeting with all the controls. These are fine for a standard peer-to-peer team meeting or similar, but they give me the jitters if I'm trying something fancy like breakout rooms or launching apps.

I think that a meeting should always be scheduled by a real person or at least an account a real person can sign into. That person is called the Organiser. Ideally that person should join the meeting or at least be close on hand too!

2. You can create meetings in the Teams app

If the last one sounded simple, this one sounds obvious. But I’d assume 90% of Teams meetings are created through Outlook, and why not? That’s how we’ve worked for years.

I prefer to create important meetings through Teams itself, mainly to access the meeting templates and other in meeting apps.

What is a template? A template allows you to quickly create a meeting with settings enabled to achieve the best outcome for what you’re trying to do.

Examples are:

• Meeting – a peer-to-peer discussion, this is the type of meeting Outlook creates
• Webinar – a presentation event, a few presenters and an audience who can listen only
• Town hall – a very large meeting with production abilities

There are more, look them up. I love the webinar template, particularly because it looks after the registration process for me too. It’s what we use for our Your 365 Coach Live events.

3. Meeting options

If a template is not quite right for the experience you’re hoping to create, as an organiser, hop into the meeting options either before or during the meeting to make some fine tuning.

Things you can work on are:

• Security – control on the lobby
• Audio and Video – who can speak or turn on a camera
• Engagement – switch chat and reaction off
• Roles – set up some helpers for your meeting
• Recording and transcript – who can record, has access to recordings and if Copilot can be used

4. Meeting Roles

These are set up in the meeting options. There are four roles, two of which are optional, they are:

• Organiser – the person who set up the meeting, they can control all the meeting features and cancel the meeting
• Co-organiser – up to 10 people elected by the organiser to help out, they can do most of the things an Organiser can do. (But not everything!) Co-organisers are handy for managing breakout rooms or Q&As
• Presenter – optional role that determines in a meeting who can share a presentation (or talk in a webinar)
• Attendee – everyone else, this group has the least privileges in a meeting.

Next time you’re planning the department all-hands meeting or looking to host a training session check these tips out.

All these help you out before the meeting, I’ve got lots of tips to make meetings more engaging but I’ll save them for another blog.

Matthew

Matthew is a Consultant at Your 365 Coach

Published 25 July 2024

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