Do you use the status message in Teams?
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Your status message is a lightweight coordination tool. When maintained properly, it reduces interruptions, avoids unnecessary “what are you working on?” messages, and helps teammates move faster without needing a meeting.
A good Team's status should instantly answers three things:
- What project you’re working on
- The people that you need to speak to (they will get the notifications)
- Where you are working from (even better, add the timezone relative to AEST)
✅ Figure: Good example - Brady indicates he's on client work. I won't bother him
Updating your Status Message
To update the status message, follow these steps:
- On the top right, click on your photo
- Click on the pencil icon to edit the status message
Figure: Updating your Teams Message
The status message is helpful when it contains:
- Project: xxx (the product/project you’re working on) | yyy (the tasks you’re working on)
- Need: xxx (team members that you’re working with – use @mention to tag these members)
- Location: xxx (where you’re working from e.g. Home, SSW Melbourne, CBA, etc.)
The benefit of using the field names with the colon is that it allows you to programatically extract the information
E.g. on SSW SophieBot, when you ask “who is Patrick”, you could also see this information and query why the location field is different from the Wi-Fi he is connected to.
Extra Tips
- Enable “Show when people message me”
- For “Clear status message after”, select Never (to prevent Microsoft from deleting the status message)
- Click Done once complete