Microsoft Teams is by far the most rapidly growing unified communications solution, with companies across the globe implementing it to enrich their communication structures.
With Teams being such a crucial part of the modern workflow, huge benefits can be realised by ensuring you’re using it to its full potential. In this blog, we’ll cover some of the top tips to work smarter in Microsoft Teams.
Send Urgent Messages
With overloaded inboxes, it can be easy to miss messages coming in. In Microsoft Teams, you can mark messages as urgent by pressing the exclamation mark in the toolbar below the textbox in the chat interface, which will send frequent notifications to the recipient.
Use Meeting Reactions
Sometimes you want to show your approval of something in a meeting, but don’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation or presentation. Meeting reactions make this simple. Just click on the Reaction menu during the meeting and click a reaction, and they’ll pop up on the side for everyone to see.
Create Polls
Asking an open question during a meeting can be hard to manage and difficult to monitor responses. Polls are a great way to easily get opinions without hassle. They’re easy to set up and can be a great way to collect data without having to sift through discussions to work out what people think. To make a Poll — click the ‘Microsoft Forms’ button in the taskbar and fill in the relevant information, and you’re done!
Automate Tasks with Power Automate
Automation is powerful. Rather than having to manually work through a list of tasks, automation can take care of it for you. This can save hours of time and effort, and ensure the tasks are all performed correctly and uniformly every time.
In Microsoft Teams, you can easily set up buttons to do multiple things automatically, without needing to manually input.
- Go into the Store tab on Microsoft Teams.
- Select ‘Workflows’ and select a template to create a workflow.
- Fill in each parameter, and you’re good to go!
Use Live Transcripts
Live transcription is a great way to ensure that hard-of-hearing employees or those with a poor audio connection can stay in the conversation. It’s also a simple way of creating meeting notes rather than having to listen back to a whole recording.
To turn on live transcription, press the three dots on the meeting controls to view ‘More actions’, and click “Start Transcription”.
You can also change the transcription language. To do so, click the three dots on the right of the transcript window and click “Change Spoken Language”.
Reorganise your Teams
You may want to put a specific team at the top of your Teams interface for ease of access. Or, perhaps you want to sort your teams alphabetically to make it simple to find particular one when required.
Just click and hold your cursor on the team that you want to move and drag it to its new place on the teams list.
Use Loop Components
Microsoft’s ground-breaking Loop is the future of collaboration in the workplace. And, you can now make use of Loop in Teams. With Loop components, you can collaborate with your team on anything — from agendas, to ideas, to simple checklists.
By sending a Loop Component into a chat, you allow anyone in that chat to be able to work on it collaboratively. To do so, click on the Loop components button in the taskbar. Then, enter whatever you want into the component, and press send.
People will instantly be able to inline edit the component in the chat, and you can even send the same component to multiple chats.
Bookmark Important Conversations
Sometimes, you’ll find that someone in your team says something that’ll be important later. Rather than having to dig back and search for it, it’s much easier to save these messages.
To do so, hover over those messages and click on the three dots next to the reactions, then click “Save this message”. This will save that message to your saved messages, for easy reference. You can also pin messages to the channel here.
Create Teams Templates
Rather than creating a team from scratch, you can use pre-made templates. You can either create a template for use in all of your teams from scratch or turn a team you already have into a template.
Create a template from scratch
- Go to the Teams menu, and into ‘Team Templates’.
- Click ‘Add.’ and then ‘Create a brand new template.’
- Fill in the template-builder with the template name and description.
- Add any channels you may want to the template.
- Your template is created!
Create a template from an existing team
- Go to the Teams menu, and click on ‘Team Templates’.
- Click on ‘Add’, and then select ‘Use an existing team as a template.’
- Select the team you want to use as a starting point.
- Fill in the template name and details.
- If need be, you can add new channels or edit existing channels in the template.
- Your new template is done!
Get Started with Microsoft Teams!
Microsoft Teams is a powerful communications tool that can open up new collaborative workflows for your organisation. These are just a few Tips & Tricks to help unlock its full potential, download the eBook to gain insights around productivity, communication & collaboration.
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