- February 25, 2021
How to have better meetings in Microsoft Teams
Since the Covid pandemic, we have all found ourselves sitting in more meetings. Some of us seem to live in meetings. And we don’t always find that each meeting is as productive or as useful as it could be. So how can you improve your meetings, make them more efficient and have better, more consistent outcomes. Good meetings of course don’t come automatically: attendees and facilitators must do their part in better planning, driving agendas and subsequently allocating tasks and follow-ups. To help them, there are some great applications that can be accessed through Teams. Ones that can really help improve a meeting experience.
Microsoft Teams is designed to be a “single pane of glass” that allows you to see all of your work in one place. However, this is only possible if you integrate Microsoft or partner, custom apps, bots, automated workflows, and dashboards with Teams.
In this blog post, we are exploring the ways of staying in the flow of work with apps and workflows in Teams and make Microsoft Teams work for you to have better meetings.
Many apps in meetings have a pre-meeting preparation experience you can engage in before a meeting starts (e.g., setting up an agenda, designing simple poll questions.) Then, during a meeting, you can call up your tools as needed and as it fits the conversations you are having.
To get started with apps in meetings, edit the meetings you have scheduled and sent out within Teams, and select the “+” button at the top to add apps to your meetings:
Now you can transform your meeting experiences with different apps to suit the types of meetings you are in.
1. To make your meetings count with an agenda builder, minutes templates, and more built inside Teams you could look at DECISIONS App.
Decisions is the only meeting solution built entirely into Microsoft Teams for an easy-to-use and secure solution for better meetings, leveraging the tools you use every day. Start your free trial now. No credit card or commitment required.
It is a Microsoft-awarded solution that powers meeting collaboration, engagement and productivity for users of Microsoft Teams.
Thousands of customers trust Decisions for their meetings, whether held virtually, in-person or a hybrid of the two.
For all the time that you and your colleagues spend within a meeting, you want to ensure actionable outcomes and next steps. This will help you, as a meeting organizer, become instantly better structured and outcome-oriented for the meetings you run. Within a meeting, Decisions takes advantage of the meetings pane so that you can see and interact with the agenda, alongside your colleagues, in real time during a meeting. With the power to keep the agenda always in view – alongside capabilities for adding notes, tasks, and taking votes – you can ensure that every great idea and every action follow up is recorded.
A comprehensive meeting methodology:
Create
Create a great meeting foundation with an agenda builder directly inside Teams – add descriptions and attachments, assign presenters and set objectives.
Prepare
Help attendees prepare for the meeting. Share the agenda inside the Teams channel where they can ask questions, start conversations and suggest topics.
Run
The agenda, attachments, time tracker and voting are available as an in-meeting extension inside the side panel, without leaving the Teams meeting window.
Manage
Tasks and decisions sync from the minutes to Microsoft Planner or other task management tools so you never miss a follow-up.
Key Features:
- Agenda builder
- Minutes templates in Word or OneNote
- Teams in-meeting experience
- Time tracker
- Secure voting
- Task and decisions syncing to Planner and To Do
2. Always be on the same page with effective and structured 1-on-1 meetings - no matter where you are with Teamflect App.
Teamflect provides rich context by getting behavioral data from Office 365 and helps managers access deep insights generated from the daily communications with their direct reports and peers.
For managers and their team, the 1-on-1 meeting is a critical tool for team members to shape their relationships– including their status review, yearly plans, mentoring relationships, and more.
Teamflect facilitates a way to manage and structure the process of those management relationships within an organisation. It evaluates your connections with other colleagues and makes it easy to record follow up notes and feedback from your management conversations with your teammates. Because it particularly focuses on 1-on-1 conversations between managers and their team, it has focused tools to help structure plans for growth for everyone on your team. To have better and more structured 1-on-1s, give Teamflect a try within your next management meetings
Key Features:
1-on-1s
Easily organize 1-on-1s and make the most out of them with talking points, action items, and private notes.
Recognitions
Get recognized for your hard efforts and celebrate your colleagues to keep them motivated.
Feedbacks
Help your employees grow by giving constructive feedback or by requesting feedbacks on their behalf.
Tasks
Be on top of your business and track your direct reports with an easy to use tasks module right inside Outlook and Teams.
Notes
Take notes with Teamflect and never forget important details about your direct reports or colleagues.
3. Make your meetings more interactive with live polling and Q&A directly in Microsoft Teams with Sildo App.
During a meeting – especially a large meeting – you will want to plan for ways to keep the audience engaged.
With Sildo you can ask your audience questions so you can encourage conversation or tailor your pitch to the mood of the audience.
It supports several different question types – including word clouds, multiple choice questions, quizzes and ratings, there are a number of options for pausing during a meeting to ask for more audience participation and engagement. Simply have it all in one place – both presenters and attendees can interact without ever leaving Teams Meetings.
Key Features:
- Create word clouds and other live polls to get instant feedback
- Run a competitive quiz with leaderboard
- Collect the most burning questions with live Q&A
4. Immersive microbreaks for the workday, powered by our bodies in motion with Breakthru App.
Bite-sized breaks designed for fast-to-feel impact boost our mood, productivity, and wellbeing. A playful way to modulate your sense of time, and build new restorative habits.
Breakthru is not just an individual betterment tool but focused on the wellbeing of the group. At its core is the belief that people adopt healthier habits and thrive with support and accountability to a community. To encourage remote collaboration, Breakthru is designed to be shared in a meeting or given as a gift by a friend, colleague, or trusted leader within an organization. People take better care of themselves when they take care of each other.
Give Breakthru to friends as gifts, share it as an icebreaker in meetings, or challenge yourself to feel energized, confident, centered, and joyful. It will help you to take 2-minute mini breaks with meditative exercise that can help you and your team re-energize.
Useful to enterprise and employees today, as they navigate a new work landscape, and to educators and students as they navigate the new learning landscape. Breakthru delivers mental and physical wellbeing impact as we help people combat sedentary behavior, modulate their sense of time, and build new restorative habits.
Key Features:
Self-paced
Play in your day as needed. Launch Breakthru through the personal tab, pick a mood, and let go.
In a chat
Call on Breakthru in a chat and gift a breakthru to your teammates. Choose the mood to gift them. Bring energy to your team’s day.
In a meeting
Share Breakthru in a meeting. Launched by the meeting organizer in the context of a call. As an icebreaker. As the opening of a break period. At the close of a meeting. As a way to create collective energy, by bringing people together through movement and play.
Make Microsoft Teams work for you
For all the decisions and actions that take place in meetings, apps within and outside of meetings will give you the right tools to get to better outcomes. These can also include Microsoft apps, like Excel, Planner, SharePoint, Forms, or OneNote, or third-party apps, like Trello, Wikipedia, Asana, Evernote, and GitHub.
With these apps in your toolbox, you can run more meaningful and engaged meetings throughout the week – and keep everyone engaged. And if you spend a lot of time in Microsoft Teams, apps will make your workdays much easier and more efficient.
Microsoft Teams gives today’s businesses the central environment that their teams have been looking for to access truly aligned collaboration and communication services. If you’re ready to reduce the complexity of your communication stack with one of the most comprehensive approaches to unified communications and collaboration on the market, Microsoft Teams and Formation Tech as a business partner could be just what you need.
We provide tools that enable employees to be more productive. We help businesses work smarter, more safely and securely, from anywhere. And if you need help on where to begin. Feel free to get in touch, so we can chat through the solutions and introduce the team.