Microsoft Teams Scavenger Hunt: Intermediate Level
Welcome to the second in our series of three Microsoft Teams scavenger hunts!
This intermediate level scavenger hunt is designed for people and work groups who are somewhat familiar with Teams, but want to explore more features. Many of these tasks involve being in a live Teams meeting with a colleague, so make sure you're working with at least one other person on this.
Get started by downloading the Microsoft Teams Intermediate Scavenger Hunt below.
Share it with your working group during a team meeting. Then, get ready, set...go! See how long it takes you to complete. Come back to the bottom of this post to get answers. Then, reach out and let us know - how did you do?
When you're done, have your team leader complete the Microsoft Teams Owner Foundations Scavenger Hunt to help set team expectations and organize your collaboration practices.
INTERMEDIATE ANSWER KEY
If you’re new to working remotely, team meeting frequency probably rose at first. Meetings can be a way to replace the conversation across the hall or the coffee refill “quick chat” interaction some of us are used to having. Meeting options are rich and varied in person, and the same goes for Microsoft Teams. Here are the answers to our scavenger hunt, mostly focused around having virtual meetings. Good luck!
Start a Group Chat (There are at Least Four Ways!)
- Click the Chat button on the left rail! Three more to go…
- Click the paper and pencil icon to the left of the search bar - good find!
- Visit the search bar and type the command /chat - then add the person or people you want to connect with
- This is a derivation of #1 above but it’s more clicks in: Go to Chat, choose the Contacts tab, click the ellipsis option next to your desired person and choose “Pop out chat.”
Post to a Meeting Chat, Mark as Urgent
Urgent messages keep sending reminders - a sure way to get someone's attention. Posting into the chat is easy to do. Click the Chat icon on the Meetings menu, but then access the rich text formatting under the "A with the pencil icon" at the far left. The options here include (left to right): rich formatting, urgency, attaching a file, emjois, GIFs, stickers and your company’s Teams ecosystems of connected apps under the ellipsis.Mark the chat as Urgent, and ask your team to tell you about the nuances between important and urgent messages to ensure group agreement on when they're each to be used.
Meeting Notes, Whiteboard
Meeting Chat, Notes and Whiteboard all get automatically saved and associated to your meeting. Ask your users to create a meeting and use all three functions, confirming what gets saved to the meeting and what doesn’t. Most artifacts are saved, however, Admin Messaging Policies may vary from company to company. Depending on your organization's policies, you may want to determine how your team will memorialize notes, drawings, and shared content after the session.
Add a Meme in Real Time in the Meeting Chat
We all need a little levity these days, right? Encourage your team to play around with the social/visual elements of Teams; there are hidden fun components like an on-the-fly meme creator tool (found when you click the purple smiley-face that looks like a sticker). Anything with a pencil icon beneath it means you can usethat to customize your meme.
Turn on Live Captions
This is a useful feature to turn on for those who may be differently-hearing-abled or unable to join your meeting’s audio. Teams can, in fact, be used for public webinars quite effectively given these captioning effects.Depending on the settings your Microsoft administrator has enabled, Teams can be configured to allow attendees from outside your organization (business partners or customers). When in your meeting, click the ellipsis to get the menu of choices.Turning on live captions will capture the words of everything that gets said, or sung.
Make a File a Tab
This feature appears in your team’s files area. We have upped the nature of the challenge in this to make it more freeform. Ask your scavenging teams to give you an example of what they learn when they try to make a file into a tab (it’s odd, but educational). Possible answers include:
- Directional document that people use over and over that needs its own “uber-visibility” within the section
- Not just any type of file can become a tab; image files need not apply
- It’s like pinning a file to the top but packaging whatever file that is as more of a menu item
- Comment on this post to share back with us what you found (we like learning too!)
Post to Multiple Channels at Once
Something happens that’s urgent and the whole team is now “all hands-on deck!” Create a post that publishes to multiple channels to reach everyone. Make sure you're only posting to channels with different audiences to avoid spamming people.Two linked squares appear in posts that are in multiple channels.
BONUS: Change Meeting Background
Background effects can make it look like you live in an upscale apartment, work in a hip downtown loft, or are dialing in while on vacation... instead of your cluttered office. While you can't currently upload your own, you can choose from a variety of fun backgrounds that take you far, far away from wherever you're currently sitting.
MORE SCAVENGER HUNTS:
Beginner: For people who are fairly new to Teams. This hunt is designed to familiarize you with the platform's most basic functionalities, creating "aha!" moments when you master the tool.
Team Owner Foundations: For leaders of small working groups who have some experience with Teams, but who now need to set clear norms and foundations so that everyone is on the same page about what to share and where.
Talk Social to Me has over a decade of experience building engaging employee collaboration programs, and we know exactly what works. We’re effective at creating engaged, happy, productive employees through the intelligent use of social collaboration tools like Microsoft 365, Teams and Yammer. Ready to help teams work better together? Reach out to our CEO Carrie Marshall at carrie@talksocialtome.com for more information.
