8 Tips for Using Teams Videoconferencing
Here are some helpful tips to improve your next video meeting. Suddenly, we’ve all been spending a lot more time looking at our colleagues through Teams video conferences as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. If you're not used to video meetings, it can be a little intimidating at first.
Fortunately, there are best practices that you can use, here are a few tips for getting the most out of your Teams meetings.
1. Keep yourself on mute & keep your camera on
Keeping yourself on mute and always keeping your camera on (unless you have a good reason otherwise) both go a long way toward fostering a productive and engaging meeting with your remote team. To find these features on a mobile device, simply tap the screen and the microphone and video camera icons will appear. If they are crossed out you are not being seen or heard.
2. Create Teams Meetings in Microsoft Outlook and Schedule Recurring Meetings as well
If you meet with the same people on a regular basis, you can create a recurring Teams meeting within Outlook. This makes it easy to set up a schedule. Simply go to your calendar in Outlook, set up a new meeting, choose the “Teams Meeting” icon on the banner and invite your attendees. Then click the banner for "Recurrence" to set up your recurring meeting. This feature may be different depending on your device.
3. Request Control of Another Desktop
Sometimes helping a co-worker diagnose a problem or work on a project would be so much easier if you could be sitting next to that person. While Teams hasn't completely solved that problem, it does allow you to request control of your participant's desktop. They'll have to approve the request, but you'll be able to maneuver their cursor with your own mouse and keyboard, which is especially helpful for demos or technical support.
Having two screens is helpful. This means you can monitor the call on one screen and set up any content you would like to screen share on the other. This way, you can keep track of any questions that might be sent via instant message or turn people on mute if they have forgotten to turn their microphones off.
NB: If you are screen sharing, don’t forget to close any irrelevant windows beforehand (like that restaurant menu you were checking out earlier)!
4. Pay Attention to Your Background
We don't usually pay much attention to what is behind us until we log on to a meeting and can see ourselves. It's often then that you realize that it might have been worth paying a little more attention to what everyone else sees. If you don't have a great option, Teams has a simple yet effective “Background Blur” feature that helps to reduce background distractions, whether you’re in a busy office or at home with a curious cat.
To start a meeting with background blur, on the Choose your audio and video settings screen when you’re joining the meeting, move the blur slider—the one to the right of the video slider—to the right. FYI, this only works for scheduled meetings. To turn on background blur during a meeting, click More options, Blur my background.
Not all devices support background blur yet, but they’re working on it. To find out if it’s available on your device, just try the method described above. Click More options in a meeting. If Blur my background appears in the menu, then you're in business!
5. Record Your Meetings
Did you know you can record calls for invitees who missed the meeting, and for anyone who might find it interesting at a later stage – new employees, for example.
While recorded Skype for Business calls were saved to your local PC, Teams recordings are conveniently saved directly to and stored within Microsoft Stream. Once your recording is ready, you can make it accessible to others and add it to a channel. If you would like to enable video transcription, select the ‘Caption’ option within the video settings. This also helps to make the content of the video searchable afterwards. Please keep in mind, if you record a meeting, it becomes a record with retention.
6. Allow time for questions at the end
Remember that during the call, most people will have their microphones on mute. If you are asking for questions at the end, wait a few seconds longer than usual.
7. Use a Good Pair of Ear Buds or Headphones
Making sure your team can hear you well is important, especially if you're working somewhere where there might be background noise. The same goes for being able to hear them. I'm a personal fan of the Apple AirPods Pro, but honestly, any pair of wired or wireless headphones will do.
8. Keep an eye out for questions through IM
A Teams video call view will default to attendees and screen share. To track questions that may be coming in through instant messaging, click the chat icon at the top of the call window.