Many businesses are utilizing online meeting tools now more than ever. Microsoft Teams has become the first choice for organizations that care about security, privacy, and productivity. Once you are in Microsoft Teams, you can create meetings and invite anyone from your team or someone outside your organization. Managing video/audio conferences isn’t difficult, but sometimes it can become chaotic. For example, one participant might have a toddler screaming in the background but will not mute themselves. Someone could start sharing their screen browsing the web at any time without prior permission from the meeting organizer. Someone else may be using their video camera, but have a distracting pet playing in the background, drawing listeners’ attention away from the conversation. All this could be a huge headache for the meeting organizer and equally so for those attending. However, Microsoft Teams equips you with the right tools to control your meetings and ensure maximum productivity without distractions.
You can control many aspects of a virtual meeting with Teams. Here are a few simple tricks and tips to help you stay more focused in your meetings in Microsoft Teams.
Manage participants in meetings:
‘Party Crashers’ – unwelcome guests who join a meeting and spam it with memes or other offensive content – have become a common problem on some platforms. Teams allows you to prevent this by setting your meetings to make guests wait in the lobby. Every time a new user joins the meeting, you will be notified and prompted to either ‘Admit’ the user into the meeting or not.
Who can share in your meeting:
To solve the issue of unwanted screen sharing, Teams gives you the ability to set roles and permissions for those participating in a meeting. There are four different roles in Teams:
- Organizer
- Presenter
- Attendee
- Guest
Only users designated as Organizers or Presenters are allowed share content during a meeting; Attendee and Guest users cannot. Meeting organizers can assign Presenter or Attendee roles to participants according to their requirements
Manage mics:
If a participant has a noisy toddler or pet, or likes making smoothies while on a call, you can turn their mic off as a meeting organizer. To do so, hover over the bottom of the screen to show the meeting menu, then head to the participant list, where you can mute an individual or all participants. Muted participants will get a notification stating that you have muted them, and they can unmute themselves later when they have something to contribute.
Share only what you need:
Screensharing is a very handy tool but can lead to unintentional sharing of confidential or irrelevant information. To avoid this kind of information leakage, Teams provides the option to share a single window or a specific file (such as a PowerPoint presentation) rather than sharing your entire desktop. This allows you to maintain reasonable privacy while giving you the liberty to share materials relevant to your meeting.
Blur background in video meetings:
Video calls can allow us to communicate more effectively, but many people may be hesitant to turn their video on because of a messy office or the risk of a spouse in their pajamas walking by to get some coffee. By using the Blur Background feature, you can keep your viewers’ attention on you instead of your surroundings. You can either enable this feature
- as you join a meeting, or
- after you have already joined a meeting
You can utilize these and many more similar features to run your meetings distraction-free and get the most out of every meeting.
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