How to Deliver Better Meetings with Microsoft Teams Apps

Virtual meetings have now been forming a vital part of our working week for a long time. As Microsoft strive to provide us with better meeting experiences, new apps will help manage the ebb and flow of meetings keeping them on track and helping you deliver engaging and insightful meetings.

Apps have recently been released in meetings and with nearly 20 available you can cherry-pick the ones which are right for you and your teams.

To get started with apps in meetings, edit the meeting you have scheduled within Teams, then select the + button at the top of your meeting frame to add an app to your meeting.

Many of the available apps have a pre-meeting preparation experience, helping you set up agendas or design a poll before the meeting starts. During the meeting, you can call up your tools as needed.

You can customise your meeting experience by using different apps which best suit the type of meeting you are in.

1. Decisions lead to Productive Meetings

Meetings need actionable outcomes and next steps. Decisions app for Teams meetings starts with an easy-to-edit agenda that allows you to organise and tag expected timelines, helping you as the meeting organiser to deliver a structured and outcome-focused session.

Within a meeting, Decisions takes advantage of the meetings pane so that you can see and interact with the agenda, alongside your colleagues, in real-time during a meeting.

You can keep the agenda always in view alongside tasks, note-taking and polls, ensuring that every idea and every follow-up action is recorded and visible to all participants.

2. Connect with your team via Teamflect

1-on-1 meetings are critical for managers and their teams. They help shape their relationships from reviews to monthly goal setting and more.

Teamflect, a new app in Microsoft Teams, provides a way to manage and structure the process of those management relationships within an organisation. Evaluating your connections with other colleagues and making it easy to record follow up notes and feedback from your management conversations with your teammates. Because it particularly focuses on 1-on-1 conversations between managers and their team, it has focused tools to help structure plans for growth for everyone on your team. To have better and more structured 1-on-1s, give Teamflect a try within your next management meetings.

3. Poll the meeting audience with Slido

Polls are a great way to keep audiences engaged, particularly if the meeting is very large. 

Slido is a simple but flexible polling tool that is easily integrated into your meeting helping you understand the views of your audience at a glance.

Questions can be customised from multiple choice questions, quizzes, ratings and word clouds and a number of options for pausing a meeting to ask for audience participation.

4. Take a mini-break from meetings with Breakthru

When the virtual meeting fatigue sets in it's important to take some time out. Ensuring you shift your focus and relax between meetings will mean you're refreshed and engaged for your next one.

Breakthru is a new application in Microsoft Teams that helps you do just that – it helps you take 2-minute mini-breaks with meditative exercise that can help you and your team re-energise. Whether within a meeting with colleagues or just by yourself, you can enhance your overall well-being with these helpful restorative pauses that can help clear your mind for what comes next.

With these apps in your toolbox, you can look forward to more productive and more engaging meetings in 2021.