Microsoft Teams: How to Change Your Status

Imagine you are using Microsoft Teams in your office. You feel fairly confident with your skills and abilities and have figured out how to set meetings, participate in meetings, and generally navigate throughout the platform with ease. Then, your phone rings and it is an important client. You think that this call might take a while and you would rather not be bothered by notifications or contacted during the call. What do you do?

Microsoft Teams allows you to share your status with your colleagues, whether you are working remotely or in a different area of the organization. However, if you don’t know how to change your status, this feature will not and cannot help you. It is important to know how to change or customize your status in Microsoft Teams and what the available options are for your status.

To change your status in Microsoft Teams, take the following steps:

Click on your profile picture in the upper right corner
Hover over your current status
Select a new status

What Options Are Available for Your Status?

The following options will be seen when you hover over your existing status or search in the command box by using the shortcut “Ctrl + /”.

Available means you are active on Teams and don’t have anything in your calendar.
Away occurs automatically when you lock the computer, the computer enters idle/sleep mode or on the mobile app if the Teams app is in the background.
Busy is useful when you want to focus on a task but you do want notifications to pop up (your status is automatically set to busy if you are in a meeting or on a call).
Do not disturb is useful in situations when you want to focus or present your screen to other people. You will not see notifications if you choose do not disturb. You will only see messages if they are flagged as urgent.
Be right back (brb) means that you are temporarily away. This never happens automatically
Appear away is the status you should use when you need to work without responding right away.
Offline means that you aren’t signed in – don’t choose this one but could appear

In addition to changing your status, you can set a status message in Microsoft Teams to share why you are busy and when you can be expected to respond. Anytime you change your status, it is automatically synced with outlook. One thing that efficient people typically do to improve their efficiency is to stop multitasking. When you change your status to Busy while you are on the phone with an important client, you eliminate the constant notifications and allow yourself to concentrate on the task at hand.

Now, more than 75 million people are using Microsoft Teams every day. We hope this brief introduction helped you learn how to save time and effort by changing your status in Microsoft teams. At K2 Technologies, we are ready to help you learn how to make Microsoft Teams and other programs work to make your company more efficient. Contact k2technologies.net at 888-686-3025 or [email protected] for more information today.

Microsoft Teams: How to Change Your Status