Does planning and organising really float your boat? 

OR…do you live in a world of chaos, but long to kick-ass at organising? 

Either way, you might be surprised about how Microsoft tools can help you!  

In this blog you will learn: 

• What Loop is 
• How to add an agenda to a Microsoft Teams meeting using Loop 
• How Loop can help you get organised by capturing meeting actions and reminding people about them 
• (Plus some of the things you can’t quite do yet…) 

What is Loop 

Microsoft calls Loop a “ transformative co-creation experience”, which sounds really fancy, and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. If being able to co-edit the same document with others blows your mind, this is like that but on steroids. It’s maybe one of those “you need to try it to fully understand it” things: https://loop.microsoft.com/learn. 

Microsoft is still developing it, so no doubt there will be lots more useful things to come from it. For now, let’s focus on how it can help you get your Teams meetings organised. 

How to add an agenda to a Microsoft Teams meeting using Loop 

Have you ever been to meetings that you wished you hadn’t wasted your time on, because they were completely pointless? (If the answer to that question is no, you’re definitely lying.) 

We’ve all been there. And you don’t want your meetings to feel like that to other people, do you? (This time, the answer should be no!) 

If you set up a meeting from your Teams calendar, there’s a really easy way to make sure that you define the purpose of your meeting up front, and that’s by creating an agenda using Loop. 

Go to your Teams calendar and create a new meeting. Once you’ve added all the logistical information like who, and when, you’ll find at the bottom there’s an option to “Add an agenda others can edit”:

If you click on it, Teams will set up a Loop component for you for this meeting: 

You can: 

• Change the title of the meeting notes 
• Add agenda items, and even @mention the people who would lead that part of the agenda 
• You can also pre-add some meeting notes if you like 

My usual advice is the same for a meeting invite; start with the end in mind. What is it that you need to get out of this meeting? Be as specific as possible.

By the end of the meeting, what needs to have happened? Is it; 

• A decision
• Your team to have clear next actions on a project 
• Advice and guidance 
• To provide a progress update (if yes, is a meeting the best way to do this?) 
• Nothing in particular, you’d just like to have a chat and strengthen relationships (that’s still a thing!) 

Once you have the end in sight; you can work backwards from that and list out your agenda items accordingly. 

When you send the meeting invite – those who are invited will have the option to add agenda items and notes of their own, keeping everything in one place. (They’ll have to do this from the invite on their Teams calendar though – the Loop component won’t appear to them in Outlook.) 

How Loop can help you get organised by capturing meeting actions and reminding people about them

During the meeting, the Loop component will automatically pop out in the side window, so that it’s visible to everyone who’s joined: 

In real time you and anyone else in the meeting can add agenda items, change the order of them, and tick them off as they’re covered. 

You and anyone else can also add any meeting notes – all the changes will show for everyone straight away. 

One of my favourite parts is that you can also capture actions within the Loop component. 

You can:

•  list out the action
• assign it to someone within the meeting (at the moment, you can only assign actions to people internal to your organisation) 
• give it a due date

This then creates a task using Microsoft To Do (which I’ve talked about in an earlier blog), so whoever the task is assigned to will see the task in their To Do task list, which they can easily see from their Outlook window. 

They’ll then get reminders via email when the task is overdue:

Could be a great way to keep people accountable to their actions if you can get everyone to buy in to the system. 

Plus – if you have a recurring meeting (maybe a 1:1 with a direct report) – you can keep adding to the agenda and the Loop component will persist across the meeting series, so if you added a task on week 1, it would show up in the Loop component on week 2’s meeting too! 

Handy for keeping track of progress. 

Sounds too good to be true? 

It is a little bit… Loop is still a work in progress so there are some limitations: 

• You can only see the Loop component from the Teams calendar, not Outlook calendar (which is where I think most people are used to looking for their meetings) – looking at the invite from Outlook it won’t be obvious at all that there even is an agenda! So you’d have to encourage people to check out the meeting in their Teams calendar to make the most of it. 
• You can only add tasks for people internal to your organisation – any external meeting participants will see the agenda and actions while in the meeting but not afterwards, and you can’t assign them tasks that will show up in their To Do list. 

I still think it has the potential to be a bit of a game changer for internal meetings if everyone can get on board with the concept – imagine a life of no more wasted time in meetings! Gasp.

Let me know in the comments if you’re already using Loop for meeting agendas and how it’s working for you.  

If you know someone who’d benefit from reading this blog, please do share it!