Read on for 10 tips and numerous tricks to help maximize productivity and collaboration across your team.

Stay Productive with Microsoft Teams

1. Stay Connected

Stay up-to-date with your projects and with your team using a shared workspace that puts collaboration, chat, calls, and meetings together in one central hub.

• Host 1:1 and team meetings from any device.

• Connect and meet with contacts inside and outside your organization.

• Catch up on the latest conversations with chat and use in-line translation to communicate with peers in your preferred language.

• Collaborate and co-author in real time with file editing across familiar Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Together Mode in Microsoft Teams - Feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone in the meeting. This allows you to focus on other people’s faces, body language, and pick up on nonverbal cues for better human interaction.

Large Gallery View - See up to 49 meeting participants at one time

Dynamic View - Customize and control how you see shared content and other meeting participants to suit your preferences and needs

• Share reactions and sentiments using emojis without interrupting the meeting flow with Live Reactions

• Engage in conversations, idea-sharing, and participate without verbally speaking using chat. To help make chat more central to meeting conversation, in-meeting chats now surface on all participant’s screens with Chat Bubbles

• Follow along with who is speaking and what is said with Live Captions with speaker attribution 1 and Live Transcriptions 1 so that everyone is seen and heard

Before the meeting, keep the preparation for content, context, and conversation in one place with persistent conversation and shared files.

During the meeting, help focus attention, drive engagement, and foster inclusion using background blur, Microsoft Whiteboard, digital hand raising, and live captions.

After the meeting, store and share relevant assets including the recording, chat, meeting notes, and transcript in a persistent conversation.

• View, edit, and collaborate together on shared documents and files, and co-author in real-time in apps such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This helps eliminate the back and forth over emailing documents and ensures you are always accessing the latest version.

• Share files within channels, meetings, and chats with a link or by uploading directly into Teams.

• Find new ways to be creative and innovate with your team using Microsoft Whiteboard. Create a more inclusive environment where everyone can add sticky notes and text, and drag and drop items as needed

• Maintain healthy boundaries by blocking out focus times throughout the day and setting your status to ‘away’ or ‘do not disturb’ to avoid distractions and interruptions. To further disconnect, set quiet hours on your mobile device to mute notifications.

• Manage connections with your team members by checking in regularly and using emojis, GIFs, and stickers to keep the conversation casual and fun.

• Help boost morale by recognizing your team members and communicating your appreciation with the Praise tool.

• Build no-code and low-code custom applications that automate routine processes and provide structure with Power Apps.

• Centralize and integrate data and reporting with the new Power BI app and share insights directly within or from Teams.

• Automate tasks and workflows with pre-built templates, custom message actions, @ mentioning, and message posting to channels with Power Automate

• See a unified view of assigned tasks from across Microsoft To-Do, Planner, and Outlook with the Tasks app in Teams.

• Organize project tasks and get your familiar Planner tab experience whether you’re on desktop, web, or mobile.

• Quickly respond with suggested short messages in chat without having to pull up your keyboard

• Experience seamless transitions across devices at home, on the go, or in the workplace with the touch of a button.

• If you’re working remotely, enjoy a change of scenery and take a walk during your next meeting using the Teams mobile app for iOS and Android.

• If you’re working onsite, join and leave meetings and interact with touchless experiences on Microsoft Teams devices in meeting rooms.

• Host company-wide live events in Teams to spark engagement and foster community and dialogue between leaders and employees.

• Bring together 1,000 participants 1 for interactive Teams meetings where attendees can chat, talk, and turn on video for real-time collaboration.

• Connect with employees, customers, and partners with a view-only mode in Teams meetings with up to 20,000 participants.

Keeping your team connected is more important than ever, and with Microsoft Teams you can enable teamwork from anywhere.

We hope these tips help keep you productive, connected, and secure whether working remotely or onsite.

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