[Guest Blog] Human Touch with Microsoft Teams

by Contributed | Mar 17, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This blog is written by Mario Trentim as a part of our Humans of IT guest blogger series. Mario has a passion for creativity, problem solving, continuous improvement and technology. He shares his best practices to adding a human touch to your remote experience on Microsoft Teams. 

I delivered a webinar about team building and teamwork. To my surprise, I got a lot of comments mentioning that it is challenging to engage with colleagues virtually. People even mentioned that we are losing touch with our human side because of technology. What are your thoughts on this, especially as we’ve shifted to remote work? 

As we’ve all experience remote work now and picked up a tip or two, we know virtual meetings do not have to be boring, inflexible, impersonal neither meetings have to be always “straight to the point.” It is important to know that if you feel disconnected from your coworkers, you can make a change in the way you’re conducting or participating in meetings, and ultimate, it’s on you. The technology is “just” a tool.

In this article, I bring some tricks and tricks to engage and motivate coworkers using Microsoft Teams. Please read on if this is relevant to you. 

By working in a physical space, you have the chance to approach your colleagues in various ways. You meet informally at the cafeteria, you have lunch together. You can walk across the office and ask for help or chat about personal topics.

Working from home and moving to virtual-only meetings, are we sentenced to behave like machines? The answer is no.

It is on you and your team to build productive habits. To be a valuable team member, it is essential that you:

• Participate actively in the discussions;


• Provide feedback; 


• Be empathetic.

As we reflect on the principles above, we can come up with simple behaviors for our daily virtual meetings and teamwork collaboration. Let’s start with virtual meetings:

1) Turn on your camera;
2) Take a few minutes to talk about personal topics;
3) Pay attention to people’s reactions and ask questions;
4) Take notes, paraphrase, and summarize.

I discovered that by changing my Microsoft Teams’ background can spark interesting warm-up conversations. I use photos from the places I visited, sometimes cartoons or movie scenes.

Warming-up questions are a cornerstone of every meeting. Ask direct questions about hobbies, family, or other appropriate topics. For example, “How is Ana doing with homeschooling?”, “Is your dog okay?”, “Did you had a chance to go for a run yesterday?”. Well, use your imagination.

It is not a chore. You have to be genuinely interested in the other person. Start doing that, and you will feel better.

Multi-tasking and half-hearted attention are obstacles to productivity and team morale. Avoid them at all costs. To get people focused, ask questions, engage people, summarize.

By using Microsoft Teams, I take full advantage of collaboration with Microsoft Whiteboard. It is an engaging and fun process.

Finally, don’t forget to define action plans and owners. Assigning responsibility and following up on decisions is a final touch on team motivation. In the physical office, we could have those Post-It notes.

You can do the same with Microsoft Teams by using Lists or Planner. Visually tracking goals and activities is another tool for engagement and motivation.

Hope that this article was a reminder of the human touch we’re are all capable of having from our homes. As we are all now well-versed in remote work, what other suggestions do you have? Share in the comments below!

Teams Meeting Recording Diagnostic in Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

by Contributed | Mar 17, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Hi Teams Community,

We’re back with another addition to Support Diagnostics for Microsoft Teams.  @João Loureiro has written our third offering in the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, the Meeting Recording test.   

This new Diagnostic will help you troubleshoot and test if you meet requirements to record a Teams meeting.  If you recently attempted to record a Teams meeting or group call and you were unable to, for example the Recording button was greyed out, you should use this diagnostic to help you troubleshoot.  

To access the new diagnostic, navigate to Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, select Microsoft Teams, then click on the Teams Meeting Recording Test.  

You’ll need to enter valid credentials of an affected account. Optionally you can specify the Teams Meeting URL you are planning to record. Keep in mind your end users can also perform these tests, you do not need to be an Administrator of your tenant.  In some scenarios you’ll want to work with your impacted end user to run the tests and collect additional data for Microsoft Support.  

At a high level the test checks a couple things:

• The user is licensed and fully provisioned for Teams


• The user is enabled for cloud meeting recording


• Recordings saved to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint or Microsoft Stream


• If recordings configured to use Stream will check if user is within valid region for streaming


• The user as permissions to record provided Teams Meeting URL

You’ll also want to go over the following documents carefully when configuring Teams cloud meeting recording

Teams cloud meeting recording

Use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint or Stream for meeting recordings

Record a meeting in Teams

Please give the new diagnostic a try if you’re having trouble with Teams Meetings Recording and let us know if it helped?

Thanks!
Microsoft Teams Support