Teams Meetings Best Practices

Teams Tip

Since July of 2020, UWM Teams users have held more than 22,400 Teams meetings. Now that you and your coworkers have adopted Teams into your workflow, here are a few of UWM IT’s best practices for working remotely with Teams.

Make sure your general Teams settings are configured correctly.

  • You don’t want to miss an important chat message or even miss an entire meeting. Make sure you have the outlined configuration below in your general application settings by clicking your person icon in the upper right corner of the Teams desktop client and then choosing Settings:
    • Auto-start application
    • On close, keep application running
    • Turn on new meeting experience

Make sure your equipment is working as expected.

  • There’s nothing worse than going to join a meeting only to find your webcam isn’t being detected by your device. Check your device settings to make sure your webcam, microphone, and speakers are working as expected before joining your next meeting by clicking your person icon in the upper right corner of the Teams desktop client, choose Settings, then choose Devices from the menu on the left.

Convert pre-existing meetings to Teams meetings.

  • If you haven’t already converted previously scheduled in-person meetings to Teams meetings, you can do so with the click of a button. To learn how to switch your in-person meetings to Teams meetings, review our article for step-by-step instructions.

Schedule your regular meetings to end early.

  • Are you constantly in back-to-back meetings with no breaks in between? Instead of blocking out the full time on your calendar, you can schedule your reoccurring meetings to end early by 5-10 minutes. This will allow for more intermittent breaks for those who often find themselves in meetings all day. For instructions on how to do this in Outlook, follow our instructions.

Mute your microphone and disable your camera when attending large meetings.

  • When joining larger meetings, consider muting yourself and turn your camera off while waiting in the lobby so as to not distract participants already in the meeting. After joining, feel free to unmute/turn your camera on after minimizing background noise and seeing what the other attendees have chosen to do.

If you have any questions about Teams please call the UWM Help Desk at 414-229-4040 or visit uwm.edu/helpdesk.