Nine ways to get more out of Microsoft Teams meetings
It's Monday morning and you have three meetings before lunch. One is with a colleague in the next room, one is with a client across town, and one is with a consultant based in Auckland. Teams can handle all three without changing anything about how your day runs - if you know how to use it properly.
Most people in professional services businesses use Teams for calls and leave it at that. They mute when they're not talking, they share their screen occasionally, and they mostly muddle through. That works, but it also means they're getting about a third of what Teams can actually do for them. The meetings run longer than they need to, follow-up tasks get lost, and people who weren't in the room stay out of the loop.
The good news is that Teams is designed for exactly the kinds of meetings a busy practice runs every day. A few habits, set up properly, make a genuine difference.
Schedule meetings directly from your Outlook calendar and Teams will automatically generate a join link for every attendee - including people outside your business who don't have a Teams account. They join through a browser. No download required. This matters when you're meeting with clients or referral partners who aren't on Teams themselves.
Use the lobby feature so external attendees wait to be admitted rather than joining mid-conversation. It takes thirty seconds to enable and means you're never caught off-guard when a client arrives early while you're still briefing your team.
Send the agenda in the meeting invite, not in a separate email. Teams lets you add notes directly to a scheduled meeting so everyone sees the same document before they join. This cuts the first five minutes of every meeting - the part where someone asks what you're covering today.
Turn on live captions if your team has anyone joining from a noisy environment or if you're meeting with clients who have hearing difficulties. It's already built into Teams and costs nothing extra to use.
Use the chat panel during meetings to share links or documents without interrupting whoever is speaking. Anything shared in the chat stays there after the meeting ends, which means it doesn't get buried in email threads.
If you're running a larger meeting - a team briefing, a client presentation, or a webinar-style session - use the background blur or a custom background. It keeps the focus on the conversation rather than whatever is happening behind you in the office.
Record meetings when it makes sense. Teams saves the recording to Microsoft 365 and generates an automatic transcript. For complex client discussions or staff briefings, this means anyone who couldn't attend can catch up without needing someone to write detailed notes. If you want to understand more about what Microsoft 365's built-in features do day to day, there is more detail worth reading.
Use breakout rooms for workshops or team sessions where you want small groups to work through something before reporting back. It's the digital equivalent of splitting into groups at a whiteboard, and it keeps everyone engaged instead of one or two people carrying the whole conversation.
After the meeting, use the meeting notes in Teams to assign follow-up tasks before everyone closes the window. Tasks assigned in Teams connect directly to Microsoft To Do, so nothing gets lost between the meeting ending and the email summary arriving. Tools like the updated Microsoft Planner can extend this further for practices that need more structured task tracking across the team.
Getting these habits in place takes some initial setup and a bit of coaching for the team. If your Microsoft 365 environment isn't configured to support them - or if people keep defaulting back to email and phone - that's usually a sign your setup needs a look. Good IT support for professional services businesses includes making sure your tools are actually configured for the way you work, not just switched on and left to run.
If you'd like to know whether your current setup is working as well as it could, ITstuffed offers a 15-minute IT Fit Check - book one at /booking.