Why are productive meetings so few and far between? In fact, meetings have become the butt of many jokes, mainly on the assumption that they are an inefficient use of everyone’s time. The general consensus seems to be that there are too many meetings and they are just too long.
With the adoption of digital conferencing, meetings may have gotten more convenient, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have gotten more productive. The engineers at Microsoft took notice of this issue and wondered what they could do to increase the efficiency of meetings. They developed a pretty simple, yet surprisingly effective solution. Raise your hand. Just as you raise your hand to indicate you would like a turn to speak in an in-person meeting, you can now do the same thing digitally. If your meetings usually descend into a free-for-all, where attendees have to shout over each other to be heard then this is a feature worth utilizing.
The feature is already turned on in Microsoft Teams and is mostly self-explanatory. However, we have put together a short video just to show you the basics. Try it in your next meeting and see the difference.
