Top 10 Best Practices for Microsoft Teams to Make Collaborating More Productive

Having best practices for all of your collaboration tools is an easy way to keep your team organized. Even for companies who are back in the office, platforms like Microsoft Teams are essential to foster communication and drive productivity. We have compiled what we think are the Top 10 Best Practices for Microsoft teams.

1. Reserve a channel for team-wide communication

Placing people in their specific roles and departments helps the organization. Microsoft Teams is no different when setting up communication methods. Developing a department-specific channel for team-wide communication can be incredibly helpful. This can help your team collaborate quickly and efficiently while allowing for some informality in the process. If your team is remote, a dedicated channel can help everyone check in consistently with one another. Staying connected, regardless of the physical location of your team members, is easy with this best practice for Microsoft Teams.

2. Add Multiple Team Owners

Worried about your team while you go on vacation? Fret no more. By adding another team owner you can interface with another manager or individual on your team to help with any requests or needs that may arise while you are out of the office. Utilizing this option can be especially helpful when you are utilizing apps in your chat.

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3. Avoid Team Name Duplication

If you are anything like me, having the same name as someone else can be really confusing - especially if neither of you have a nickname. Having duplicate channel and/or team names will only create confusion within your team. Be creative with your team names if you have to, but keep them unique.

4. Set delivery options

Getting in touch with someone quickly is easy when you can set the delivery options for your chat message. Choose from Standard, "Important" and "Urgent." Important will mark your chat message as IMPORTANT while "Urgent" will notify your recipient every 2 minutes, for 20 minutes, until it is read. This best practice for Microsoft Teams can come in handy when you need something fast.

5. Reply button

Anyone who is in a group chat knows how crazy it is when multiple people are typing and sending at once. For the fast paced brainstorming sessions, hit the 3 horizontal dots next to every message and from the drop-down box select, "Reply." This helps everyone see the thread like an actual conversation.

6. Utilize Tabs

We hit this point in our Introduction to Microsoft Teams Blog, but we feel like it's a best practice for Microsoft Teams, so we are going to mention it again. By adding apps to your different chats or channels your overall organization increases. For example you can add Excel or Azure to your chat to easily manage files or project timelines.

7. Don't Overshare You Screen

The next best practice for Microsoft Teams is something that has come to haunt many professionals, especially while working remote. The dreaded, screen-share over share. Even though everyone else might be intrigued about your 5:30pm message to Susan in Sales, not everything should be on display when screen-sharing. You can easily avoid a possible catastrophe by selecting a certain application, window, or screen (for you multi-screen users) to share during a Microsoft Teams Meeting.

8. Record Meetings

If you have to interview people, or have client meetings that you need to report back on, you can always record meetings in Teams. You can playback the video or audio on the saved recordings and the recording conveniently saves to the meeting chat to be viewed or downloaded.

9. Bookmark Messages

Need to save a specific message to quickly find later? Instead of having to scroll through days worth of messages in your chats, click the horizontal dots and then select "Save this Message." This will bookmark the message, which can also be useful when you are looking for a file. Once you save the message, it will appear in your "Saved" list under your profile view.

10. Have Fun

Our final Best Practice for Microsoft Teams, is to make sure that you have fun. You read that right - FUN! Microsoft Teams would not be equipped with emojis and gifs if you weren't meant to utilize them. This app isn't meant to be formal 100% of the time. It's easy to brighten someone's day by sending a funny gif to them. Just because you are at work doesn't mean you can't have a little fun here and there. Of course, we recommend you use your professional judgement when using these fun, casual tools.

Want more Microsoft Teams? Visit our Teams page to enroll in one of our classes to learn more today!