Enhance participation in Microsoft Teams meetings
You want to provide your users with more options, control, and flexibility so they can participate in meetings in ways that work for them.
Microsoft Teams comes with features like Raise your hand, Together mode, in-meeting chat, and messaging policies like chat editing, Immersive Reader, and emojis to provide options, control, and flexible participation.
Here, you'll explore the different options available to you so that you can enhance participation in Teams meetings.
Raise your hand
For some users with hearing disabilities or who are neurodiverse, it can be difficult to find the right moment to contribute to the discussion without speaking over others. Microsoft Teams provides the Raise your hand option, so users have more ways to participate in meeting discussions in a comfortable and inclusive way.
When a user selects Raise your hand, the meeting presenter will receive a notification so they can give that user the opportunity to provide their input in a way that works best for that user. Other participants are temporarily muted while this user speaks. When the user is done, they use the Lower your hand option. The meeting presenter can also lower a participant's hand if necessary.
The Raise your hand option is available to all participants of the meeting and is a great way to let the presenter and all the other participants of the meeting know that you would like to speak.
Users can use the Raise your hand feature by doing:
In the meeting controls, select Raise your hand.
All users will see a notification that you've raised your hand.
Under Show participants, they can see other users that have their hand raised. The list is ordered according to who raised their hands first. The presenter can use it to decide who should speak first.
Support team connection with Together mode
Research has shown that people can feel disconnected and more fatigued when moving to remote working. It can result in less idea sharing, lower productivity, and strained mental wellbeing. One study has shown that brainwave markers associated with stress and overworking are found to be significantly higher during video meetings when compared to work that doesn't involve meetings, like emails.
Your users can enable Together mode in a meeting by selecting Together mode in the options during a meeting:
Microsoft Teams Together mode can help support employee wellbeing by reducing the feeling of fatigue that some remote workers experience from meetings. Early research has shown that when taking part in meetings using Together mode, participants exert less effort and are better able to focus on other participants' faces and body language to interpret important non-verbal cues. Each participant enables Together Mode for their own Teams instance. Teams then puts all participants in a single shared background to make it feel like everyone is in the same room.
Enable in-meeting chat
Chat provides users with another way to participate in the meeting discussion. For some users with disabilities, chat may be preferable to voice or sign language as a way to contribute to some meeting discussions. As the admin, you should encourage presenters to take recurring pauses to check the chat window for any feedback. Too often, presenters move things along without paying attention to the chat window.
As the admin, you can enable in-meeting chat for all users by configuring the Global (Org-wide default) meeting policy using the Microsoft Teams admin center. To do this in the Microsoft Teams admin center, you select Meeting policies, select the Global (Org-wide default) meeting policy, then set Allow chat in meetings to Enabled:
Use messaging policies for increased flexibility and control
Messaging policies provide users with greater flexibility in how they consume in-meeting chat content and more options and control over how they participate in a meeting with chat. You can provide the option to edit and delete chats, so those with learning disabilities can choose to edit their writing after they've hit send. You can give the option to communicate with emojis, so those with learning disabilities can choose images rather than writing. You can enable features like Immersive Reader, a capability designed for users who have dyslexia, to make the text easier to consume, or in-line translation for users who prefer to communicate in a different language.
As the admin, you manage messaging policies by using the Microsoft Teams admin center. Apply default messaging policy settings for all users across your organization by configuring the Global (Org-wide default) policy that is created automatically for you.
In the Microsoft Teams admin center select Messaging policies, then select the Global (Org-wide default):
Make sure Delete sent messages and Edit sent messages are set to On.
Make sure Use Giphys in conversations, Use Memes in conversations and Use Stickers in conversations are set to On.
Make sure Translate messages is set to On.
Make sure Allow immersive reader for viewing messages is set to On.
Note
Immersive Reader is available in Edge, Outlook, Microsoft 365, and Teams. This is not a plugin or add-on but is built right into the applications. Immersive Reader was developed to help those with dyslexia and dysgraphia, can be used by anyone who wants to make reading on their device easier. Some of the key features are:
- Allowing users to have content read aloud
- Changing text size and background color
- Breaking words into syllables
- Increasing the space between letters
- Highlighting one or more lines of text
- Highlighting parts of speech
Best practices
When sharing images with users who are blind and use screen readers to chat and collaborate with colleagues, you should make sure to add descriptive alternative text for the image. Read the support article that details everything you need to know to write effective alt text in the Learn more section below.
Learn more
- Everything you need to know to write effective alt text
- Future of work - the good, the challenging, and the unknown