From the course: Microsoft Teams: Successful Meetings, Webinars and Events

Set the tone for your Teams meeting

From the course: Microsoft Teams: Successful Meetings, Webinars and Events

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Set the tone for your Teams meeting

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- [Educator] There are a few best practices that I encourage you to adopt, particularly for scheduled meetings, although, they're more generally useful than that. If you remind attendees of these practices then you help encourage a culture in your team or your organization where people are responsible for their own participation in meetings. At the start of a meeting, it's a really good idea for you to turn on your video and invite others to do so. In meetings where most people don't have their video on, not surprisingly, all attendees tend to be less engaged. To be honest, it's easier to multitask if you know that no one is looking at you. So, turning your video on is a best practice, and as people join the meeting, encourage them to do so. Or at the start of the meeting, make a more formal statement. You'll notice that my video is turned on and I invite all of you to turn yours on now as well. Next, request that participants mute themselves when they are not speaking and make sure that you do that as well. Occasionally, someone will need to quickly walk away from their computer because they need to attend to something else, and in that case, you can mute them if you wish, and they can unmute themselves when they return. But it is best if all participants get in the habit of unmuting themselves to speak and muting themselves when they are done. If your organization supplies headsets for employees, it is reasonable to ask people to use them. The audio quality both for the person using the headset and for the other participants is so much better than we get through a webcam, whether that camera is built into a laptop or external. So if your organization supplies headsets, please feel free to ask people to use them as part of the meeting. All of this is sending a baseline at the beginning of the meeting for how you expect people to participate. Make sure that you end scheduled meetings on time. One of the issues that has arisen with a huge number of people working from home is that not everyone works from home well. It's not unusual for some of our colleagues to habitually start meetings late or allow meetings to run over, but it's important to most participants to be able to leave a meeting at the time that it was scheduled to end. And if you need to, set a new meeting to continue the agenda at another time. Remember to thank the members of your team for participating and for helping make the meeting a successful meeting.

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