By now, you’re probably aware that Teams is Microsoft’s platform for sending and receiving messages related to your day-to-day tasks. But are you aware of all the other features offered by the platform that can be used to make accomplishing those tasks and working with your team that much easier and more efficient?

If not, the SUCCESS team of M365 experts has outlined the features, settings, and tools offered by Microsoft Teams that can be used to improve your overall productivity.

Improve Communication and Collaboration Between Your Teams

With the advanced chat features available in Microsoft Teams, you can take your ability to communicate and collaborate with your team(s) to new heights. While you may be used to the standard formatting associated with any chat tool, Teams offers “Rich Text Formatting.” This allows you to optimize the formatting of your messages with the option to bold them, highlight them, underline them, and more.

Additionally, with subject lines, tagging features, and the announcement option, you can alert, not just one channel, but multiple channels to more important or urgent messages. These features ensure a more streamlined communication process, as information can be shared more efficiently with the appropriate members or groups within your team.

For a demonstration on how to accomplish this, watch this brief tutorial:

 

Streamline Tasks with Better Navigation and Organization Practices

When you’re working with your team, you can accomplish tasks even faster by simply copying links from your messages, chats, or channels to simply guide your teammates to the exact information they need to collaborate with you effectively.

 

And, if you’re tired of sifting through endless messages and Teams channels to find one specific piece of information, you can instead utilize Enhanced Search and Filters to quickly locate the content you’re looking for. This is easily accomplished with the option to refine your search with filters such as keywords, date, and more.

 

Declutter Your Inbox with Prioritized Notifications

If you’re fed up with cluttered email inboxes and notification overload, Teams makes it easier to set preferences for channel, chat, and meeting notifications and enable quiet hours to silence distracting pop-ups when you really need to focus.

Not only can you do this for your Teams notifications overall, but you also have the option to customize your preferences for specific chats and channels, allowing you to stay in the loop without being overwhelmed. These customizations make it so you’ll only get notified when you are mentioned or replied to in a chat, channel, or thread.

 

Optimize Your Virtual Meeting Experience

When using Teams to host virtual meetings with your colleagues, you can enhance your experience with the advanced options, special effects, and unique features that are offered by the platform.

• Advanced Meeting Options: With Advanced Meeting options, disruptions in your virtual discussions are a thing of the past. When setting up your meeting, you are in control of who is granted access, when they’re allowed to enter, and the notifications that go off upon participant entry and exit.

Learn how to update your meeting options by checking out the video below:

 

• Backgrounds and Together mode: No longer are you limited to the confines of your home office when participating in a virtual meeting. Instead, with Microsoft Teams, you have the option to transform your meeting environment with background effects and Together mode, which allows you to customize your Teams room with fun or professional options or unite your team in a shared virtual space.

Discover how to make your meetings more exciting and engaging with this brief tutorial:

 

• Breakout Rooms and Q&A: Like in an in-person meeting, Teams offers the option to break your larger group meetings into smaller ones for more intimate discussions. Breakout rooms can be set for a pre-determined amount of time, and meeting hosts also have the ability to hop in and out of each one in order to monitor progress and remain in the loop.

Additionally, utilize the Q&A feature in Teams, which provides an easy way to collect and answer questions during large meetings.

Check out the video below to discover how to utilize these tools to enhance your virtual meeting experience:

 

Dive Into the Teams Experience

Microsoft Teams is not just a tool for sending and receiving direct messages from your team. It’s also a powerful engine that, when used effectively, can drastically improve your communication and collaboration practices and increase your overall productivity. Often one of the biggest challenges, though, is knowing how to get started with the many different features offered. At SUCCESS, we can help your team get more out of Teams and the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem of tools. Request a call and discover what’s possible for your business.