Best Practices For Successful Large Teams Meetings

With employees being remote, Teams has become an integral tool in facilitating company all-hands gatherings, town halls, webinars, and product launches. Let’s take a look at some large meeting options currently available in Teams and best practices that can help deliver a positive experience for all who are in attendance.

Teams meetings offer a collaborative and interactive experience with options to add structure for large meetings. As you extend the meeting to a larger audience, it is important to take appropriate steps to make the meeting more effective. Elements from this blog post reference Microsoft’s Virtual Event Guidance document.

Organizers and Presenters:

For a smooth meeting, event organizers should set pre-defined presenters for the event. This creates the organized structure of presenter and attendee roles. After a meeting has started, presenters also can promote other attendees to the presenter role.
Define a co-organizer via meeting options
Pre-configure video and microphone settings to control attendees’ experiences.
- Disable attendees’ microphones to avoid disturbance. If someone needs to interact during the meeting, allow them to unmute when they raise their hand.
- Disable attendees’ video to avoid visual distractions. During appropriate times in the meeting, video can be permitted for all attendees or specific individuals.
Prestage meeting applications such as polls and Q&A will be used during the meeting

Recommended IT administrators and IT support staff monitoring during meetings

When necessary, use additional monitoring and support by the IT administrator for important meetings (Quick start for Admins).
Ensure that all Microsoft Network Connectivity Principles have been followed both on-premises and for remote users
IT admins can closely examine the real-time data telemetry to monitor the event and identify any possible issue and its source.

Create more interactive and engaging meetings with these tips

Use polls to gather information about attendees before and during meetings.
Interact with attendees using chat and/or Q&A. Use the Q&A app for both open and moderated meetings and webinars. You can mark best answers, filter responses, moderate and dismiss questions, and pin posts such as a welcome message. Currently, anonymous attendees are not supported but will be available later this year.
During meetings, organizers can use different views like Dynamic View, Together Mode, or Presenter mode. In addition, they can use Spotlight to highlight a single or multiple presenters to make them stand out. Note that Spotlight cannot be used in Large Gallery or Together Mode.
Remind and encourage attendees to raise their hands before speaking. With ordered raised hands, you know the order of who to call on first so that no participant is missed.
Reactions are excellent for the attendees to provide sentiment within the meeting.
Enable captions and transcription for a more inclusive meeting. Both transcription and recordings are helpful for those who missed the meeting or need a recap.

Options you can choose for large meetings
There is a plethora of information, documentation and blog articles that detail the features available for the following three meeting types, so we’ll skip the minutiae and list a few items that will be relevant to upcoming topics.

Teams Large Meetings (View-Only)

Full interactive capabilities for the first 1,000 users, with subsequent users in view-only mode
Expands the previous 300 user capacity up to 1,000*
Meetings from 1,001 to 20,000 are View-Only
Configurable Interaction Options
Disabled by default and must be enabled with PowerShell

Teams Webinars