Microsoft Teams Meetings: Our 5 Top Tips for a Productive 2022

If you and your team have been using Microsoft Teams for a while, but you’re still having your meetings in third-party apps, now is the time to make the leap and take advantage of all that Microsoft Teams Meetings have to offer.

Below are 5 tips for creating an effective and enjoyable remote meeting experience with MS Teams meetings. And if you want to learn how to get started with Meetings (how to schedule, join, and customize them), read our full guide to MS Teams Meetings).

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1. Use Noise Suppression to Block Out Your Surroundings

Attending the meeting from your home and don’t have a quiet room to yourself? Microsoft Teams Meetings has a feature for that. Use noise suppression to block out external sounds.

You can enable noise suppression right from the meeting:

1. Go to the “More Actions” > “Device Settings” at the top
2. In “Noise suppression”, choose “High”.

If you want your meeting attendees to hear your background sounds (e.g. you want their opinion on your amazing “Working from home” playlist), choose “Low”.

2. Get Meeting Attendance

Recording your meeting attendance is not just important for company accountability, it also helps you keep track of who was present for important decisions and customer calls.

You can keep a record of a Microsoft Teams meeting’s attendance a few different ways:

• From inside the meeting by hitting “Show participants” > “More actions” > “Download attendance list”

• After the meeting by clicking “Attendance report” in the meeting notification in your channel’s Posts tab (the notification pops up right after a meeting ends).

• If the meeting was scheduled in the Calendar app, you can get your list by clicking the meeting reminder in the schedule and going to “Attendance” in the top toolbar.

If you value punctuality and want to prevent people from entering a Microsoft Teams meeting after it has started, you can lock the meeting:

1. Go to “Participants” in the top toolbar of the meeting
2. Hit “More actions” > “Lock the meeting“

You can always unlock the meeting, but if it’s in “Locked” mode, no one from will be able to join it from MS Teams or from externally shared links.

3. Transfer Meetings from One Device to Another

Are you in a team meeting from your laptop, but you need to run an urgent errand while staying connected? No problem, Microsoft Teams lets you transfer the meeting you’re in straight to your phone (or vice versa).

To transfer your meeting presence from one device to another:

1. Go to the team where the meeting is happening and hit “Join” (as you would if you were just joining a meeting as usual)
2. In the window that pops up, choose “Transfer to this device”.

4. Work in Smaller Groups with Breakout Rooms

Team building is more important now than ever—with so many companies working remotely, it’s easy to feel disconnected from your team members.

With Microsoft Teams’ breakout rooms, you can do small group and one-on-one discussions in your meetings, and help your users get to know each other better! Breaking up your large meeting into smaller groups is also a great way to do focus group brainstorming.

You can split your meeting attendees into small groups any time during the meeting, here’s how:

1. Go to “Breakout rooms” in the top toolbar of your meeting
2. In the pop-up window, choose between randomly assigning attendees to rooms or selecting the groups yourself
3. Choose the number of rooms (groups) you want.

If you choose to manually assign users to breakout rooms, you will be redirected to do so after hitting “Create rooms”.

Once your breakout rooms are up and running, you can customize the time limit for small group work in the “Settings” menu, and you can send an announcement to all the groups while they’re still in breakout rooms (e.g. “Time to wrap it up, guys!”). Once your set time limit runs out, the breakout rooms will close and everyone will automatically return to the general meeting room.

To set up breakout rooms for a meeting in advance, schedule a meeting the way you normally would in a channel (learn how to schedule meetings here), and after scheduling follow these steps:

1. Hit on the Calendar reminder for the upcoming meeting in your channel’s chat (or find the meeting directly in your Calendar)
2. Go to the “Breakout rooms” tab in the top toolbar
3. Hit “Create rooms” to set the number of rooms you need, and “Rooms settings” in the top right to customize the rooms (e.g. set a predetermined time limit).

5. Create a Visual Brainstorm with Microsoft Whiteboard

We covered screen sharing earlier in this post, but we saved the best part for last—the Microsoft Whiteboard. It’s an MS Teams app that is already installed in your workspace and can be used right away in any meeting.

With Whiteboard, you and your meeting attendees can brainstorm in one creative space together.

To do this, go to “Share content” > “Microsoft Whiteboard”.

Anyone in the meeting can interact with the whiteboard with post-it notes, reactions, and sketch tools, and you can save your brainstorm masterpiece by hitting the “Settings” icon in the top right corner of the whiteboard and selecting “Export image”.

We at Perfect Wiki value communication and transparency, so we use MS Teams Meetings a lot. If those are your company’s value as well, Perfect Wiki could be the tool you’ve been looking for.

We are a company resource tool that provides pages for you to store and share your user guides, Standard Operating Procedures, marketing strategies, and more.

And we integrate seamlessly with your Microsoft Teams workspace, so you never have to think about switching between apps again.

Install Perfect Wiki for free today, no credit card required, and see just how easy it is to create a shared body of company knowledge, policies, and best practices right in your Microsoft Teams channels.

Like what you’ve read? Pass this post on to a fellow administrator or team manager—we’re positive they will learn something new about Microsoft Teams Meetings.