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9 Tips to Start Meetings With Microsoft Teams

Do your employees have trouble collaborating? Does your business struggle with organization or perhaps effectively communicating? Workplace collaboration, organization, and communication fail without engaged employees who endeavor to stay committed to their employer. But how do you define, or more importantly keep, an engaged employee?

An employee who stays engaged while at work has an emotional commitment to their employer’s organization and strives to contribute to its ongoing success. With the right tools and technology, your company’s collaboration, organization, and communication will significantly improve with engaged staff and personnel.

But what tools and technology help employees and employers stay engaged? One such tool — Microsoft Teams — which began in 2016, has over 70 million users and helps companies and workers alike with collaborating, organizing, and communicating daily, anywhere, and anytime.

2020 Employee Engagement Statistics

A lack of employee engagement affects not only collaboration, organization, and communication in the workplace, but it directly affects a company’s revenue. Over 71% of companies say that employee engagement is essential to their organization’s success.

The following statistics may shed light on why the collaboration, organization, and communication amongst your employees at your company may be failing.

  • Productivity increases with employee engagement, making companies 21% more profitable
  • Low employee engagement costs companies $450-$500 billion each year
  • 85% of employees do not feel engaged at work
  • Employees who believe their employers listen to them are 4.6% more likely to feel encouraged to do their best
  • Collaboration is in the top four essential skills for employees’ future success

So how does a company solve this lack of employee engagement problem? One of the critical drivers of employee engagement is an internal communication strategy. With an effective internal communications strategy ready to go, employees will feel more informed, secure, and motivated to strive to reach their company’s goals.

And Microsoft Teams is one such internal communication strategy to use!

How Microsoft Teams Can Help

As Microsoft’s fastest-growing business app ever, 91 of the Fortune 100 companies use Microsoft Teams. As an online collaboration tool and digital workplace — two things that increase productivity by up to 30% — Microsoft Teams gives companies a chance to solve their collaboration, organization, and communication problems and achieve the level of success they have aimed to reach.

With Microsoft Teams, companies make meetings more accessible, flexible, and more effective. Collaboration in real-time makes organizing simpler, as does the ability for colleagues to communicate anywhere, anytime. Its simplicity, along with access to Microsoft’s Office 365 suite, provides both employees and employers alike the ability to communicate effectively as well as collaborate and organize as needed.

Here are nine tips to start meetings with Microsoft Teams.

9 Tips to Start Meetings with Microsoft Teams

Join a Meeting via Audio Conferencing

If a team member does not have internet access, they can still join an audio conferencing call. Their team meetings will have dial-in directions to enable them and any user of Microsoft Office 365 to call in and connect.

Use Email to Invite Anyone

Even if someone outside of your organization needs to join your team meeting, Microsoft Teams allows it to happen. With Anonymous Join, you can have anyone with a valid email address join the meeting.

Admit Attendees from the Virtual Lobby

To give you time to prepare your meeting, your anonymous attendees will arrive in a virtual lobby by default, after which they can join the actual meeting. To not only enhance your meeting’s privacy but to give you time to make sure everything is prepared as well, you can change the virtual lobby’s settings to allow anonymous users to skip the lobby and come straight to the meeting.

Mute Out the Noise

Some attendees can cause commotion and noise, thereby making your “mute button” an essential asset. However, the attendees can always “unmute” themselves if they need to say something during the meeting. But as the meeting’s administrator, you have the capability of muting attendees from the roster one-by-one or everyone at once.

Join a Meeting or Initiate a Phone Call Without a Plug-In

Downloads can take up a lot of valuable time, but you can enjoy a plug-in-less experience with Microsoft Teams. Go to teams.microsoft.com and join a meeting. That way, you do not have to enter a meeting or a call through your desktop app or mobile device.

Share Just the Necessities

With Application Sharing, you can choose to share a specific window on your computer instead of your whole screen. That way, your emails, and other notifications stay private as you share content during the meeting.

Share Desktop Control

In addition to sharing just the necessities, with Application Sharing, you can invite others to give you control of their desktop.

Get Help with Interactive Troubleshooting

During the meeting, if you fail to realize your mute button is on, your teammates can alert you. You and your team can proactively detect and inform each other of prevalent problems that arise during a meeting to keep it effective, productive, and timely.

View Team Call Analytics

Call Analytics gives you and your helpdesk representatives the capability to search for a team’s call history for specified user calls and meetings to troubleshoot problems.

So, if you have a company in South Florida, and need award-winning IT service and support for your business, contact us today. You will be glad you did.