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Drive effective meetings with Teams apps while working remote

Over the past few months, we’ve seen tremendous transformations take place as companies adapt to remote work environments. One key trend has been the rise of virtual meetings, as companies look to maintain their rhythm of business and keep human connections while working remote. However, as the volume of meetings increase, teams face challenges with management, efficacy, and engagement. To overcome some of these challenges, we’ll highlight a few popular Teams app integrations that can help you drive effective meetings while working remote.

Streamline agenda preparation and meeting management
Effective meetings require more than corralling a group together to discuss – it requires thoughtfulness around agenda preparation, clarity on objectives, and defined sets of action items. An easy path to plan a successful meeting is to consider apps that streamline the agenda preparation and meeting management process.

SoapBox simplifies the agenda preparation and management process by allowing teams to build, collaborate, and action team meeting agendas without leaving their workspace in Teams. Using its bot and tabs, teams have a single integrated workspace where they can build agenda items, capture meeting minutes, and monitor resolution of action items – removing the administrative hurdles typically experienced with meeting management.

soap2

Collaborate with shared meeting agendas
Build agendas collaboratively by adding items to a shared agenda – reinforcing teamwork and helping ensure each attendee is fully aligned and aware of the scope and objectives of the meeting. You can also access an inventory of suggested agenda items that can be used as a supplement. Teams notifications are surfaced each time agenda items are added, closed, and reminders are sent for upcoming meetings to ensure accountability across the team.

Manage your meetings, capture minutes, and assign action items
As your meeting gets underway, tick off agenda items as you cover them, so that you know what items remain outstanding. Any agenda items not covered automatically roll over into your next meeting in the series, as needed. You can also capture meeting minutes and action items from within the app, so that team members have a central repository in Teams to access.

Access AI-powered insights from the conversations you’re having with your team
Using machine learning, SoapBox can decipher the topics you’re discussing most (and least) frequently across all your meetings. Based on your meeting insights, it will serve up suggested questions and reading materials that will help you better prepare and balance future meetings.

Learn more about SoapBox for Teams and its offering plans and how it can help you plan and manage effective meetings!

Increase engagement and human connection with visual communication

Keeping your teams engaged and connected can be a struggle – especially with a screen taking the place of a person. Maintaining the human connection with your team
Meetings are effective when attendees are engaged and have a connection with the presenter. When you remove that engagement by speaking behind material, you lose that human connection and begin to lose your audience’s full attention. With Prezi Video, you strengthen that connection with your team by keeping you and your content together on the same screen for a powerful presentation experience. Attendees remain engaged throughout the live video meeting and can engage in real-time collaboration – creating an effective presentation experience for the entire team.

Send useful pre-recorded, asynchronous updates
When live meetings aren’t needed or aren’t feasible, you can create a quick video update to share directly in your Teams channel, helping your team stay up to date without interrupting their workflow with asynchronous communication. Easy integration of your must-have information and graphics into your video screen means that team members can share and discuss key data at a time that works best for them.

Balance time and productivity
Without requiring a designer, you can create stunning videos with pre-made templates and high-quality images available on Prezi Video and save precious meeting time for more impactful discussions or even cancel a meeting entirely by sending a video and having the discussion in your team’s channel instead, saving everyone time.

Learn more about Prezi Video for Teams to get started for free and see how it can help you create powerful visual communications!

Prezi Video helps address these challenges by letting you overlay your visuals directly on screen next to you, making meetings engaging and bringing back the human connection element that’s missing in remote work. By putting you and your content together on the same screen – you create a natural, human interaction with your audience and make the meeting more impactful.

Energize your meetings with interactive challenges

Sometimes meetings just need a jolt to keep attendees engaged. Consider introducing short interactive challenges in the middle of a meeting to inject some energy.Kahoot!is a game-based learning platform that makes it easy to create, share, and play learning challenges (kahoots). Whether it’s business-focused or for fun, you can gamify the meeting experience to increase attention and engagement. With its recent integration with Teams, meeting hosts can present live kahoots during meetings or assign self-paced challenges after meetings.

Kahoot MS Teams

Launch a live challenge in your Teams meeting
Host live kahoots during a meeting to keep your attendees engaged and energized. Whether you’re looking to kick off the meeting with an ice breaker, facilitating Q&A, or gathering feedback – you can quickly access your kahoots within Teams and share your screen to allow participants to join. You can also import your PowerPoint slides into your kahoot to gamify your existing presentations. Increase engagement and run the entire experience from the Kahoot! app within Teams.

Assign a self-paced challenge in your Teams channel for your attendees
Reinforce discussion points by assigning a challenge to attendees after a meeting, which can be accessed directly from Teams. They’ll receive automated reminders to complete and you’ll be able to leverage an interactive experience to drive home key points that you want them to remember.

Results and Reporting
If you’d like to view data from the challenge, a report will be linked directly from the podium for the host to review – allowing you can see how your attendees have performed and to measure their level of engagement. Reports for live games hosted within Teams are available by logging into your account on the kahoot website.

Learn more about Kahoot! for Teams and their offerings and how it can help you create live games in your presentations!

By: Microsoft Teams Team, Microsoft

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