In short: You come across as professional in Teams through a few things in a sensible order: sound first, then picture, then the start and end of the meeting. The order follows effort, not a study that compares sound and picture. A headset, a test recording and a checklist take care of most of it today. Teams only supplies the switches.
Imagine a consultant explaining a solution to a client, technically sound and well prepared. Her microphone sounds thin and tinny. Does that colour how people judge her?
Sound first: why and how to set it up in ten minutes
A recent study points that way. Walter-Terrill, Ongchoco and Scholl (PNAS, 2025) had listeners rate short voice recordings in controlled experiments: same content, clear or tinny sound. According to summaries, speakers with poor sound were rated as less intelligent, less credible and less likely to be hired. The authors suspect that this can put people at an unintended disadvantage, because microphone quality probably goes with socioeconomic status. That is a supposition, not a finding.
That does not mean your sound decides how competent you are. It means sound can be set up quickly. My steps:
- Headset instead of laptop microphone. A microphone close to your mouth picks up less room echo and background noise than one built into a laptop casing.
- Test recording. Say a neutral sentence with no client data, record it and listen back with headphones. That way you hear how you sound to others and whether the headset is up to it.
- Room. Door and window shut, no fan next to the microphone.
- Muted while listening. For short interjections, a keyboard shortcut further down helps.
- Open-plan office. Move the microphone closer to your mouth. If that is not enough, try noise suppression on «High» (further down, under setting it up in Teams).
Picture in five minutes: height, light, background, gaze
- Height: camera at eye level or slightly above, if need be with books under the laptop.
- Gaze: move the other people's video window right below the camera and look into the lens when you speak.
- Light: light from the front, with the window in front of you or beside you, not behind you, otherwise you turn into a silhouette.
- Background: calm and tidy, or blurred.
- Clothing: suited to the situation and consistent. I know of no robust study on this for video meetings.
For height and gaze there is a large, preregistered study: Fauville et al. (2022) had 3,982 people rate staged still images of actors. Those who looked into the camera came across as more likeable and more present and a high camera as more attractive and less threatening than a low one.
Camera and self-view: an agreement, not an obligation
Camera on is not automatically better and camera off is not automatically less professional. In a field experiment, Shockley et al. (2021) followed 103 employees of a US company working from home during the pandemic for four weeks: in the weeks with the camera on, daily fatigue was higher and more fatigue went with less self-reported participation. That is self-report from one company. The study does not show that camera off is better overall, because the impression on others was not studied. It shows that a permanently running camera can cost something.
From this you can build an agreement in two minutes. It weighs things up: where relationship and negotiation matter, you accept the fatigue.
When it is about relationships, negotiations or clients, the camera is on. For pure information formats it is optional. Anyone who is bothered by the self-view hides it for themselves.
If you keep your camera off, say so briefly in the chat. You do not need to give a reason: health, caring duties, connection or privacy may be behind it.
The first and the last two minutes
Before: Join three minutes early, check sound and picture in the preview, make sure your display name looks clean and pause notifications (what Teams offers for this is described in the post on the three-line note).
Opening in four sentences (purpose, outcome, time, ground rules), here as an example:
Today we are clarifying the quote for project Nord. By the end it is settled whether we offer option A or B. We have 25 minutes. For questions, please raise your hand or use the chat.
With external participants, settle how you address each other: «Shall we use du, or stay with Sie?» Recording is subject to rules that your compliance team, HR or your fiduciary or accounting firm (Treuhand) clarify for your organisation, not the host alone.
Share out three roles (in small meetings, held by one person): facilitating, keeping time, recording decisions. Agenda and meeting length are covered in Reduce meeting overload, preparing the content in Copilot in Outlook.
Closing: Repeat the decisions out loud in one sentence, say «who does what by when» and finish on time. For example:
We have decided on option B. Lena sends the quote by Friday, Marco clarifies the prices by Wednesday. Thank you, we are finishing on time.
After that, you actually leave the meeting instead of leaving camera and microphone on. The closing sentence has a reason: according to the Work Trend Index 2023, 55 per cent of respondents say the next steps are unclear at the end of meetings (self-report, a Microsoft survey of 31,000 people in 31 markets). Whether a closing sentence fixes that has not been studied.
Setting it up in Teams: where the switches are
Menu names and availability differ by version, so the entries below give the sense of the names, not the exact wording. The meeting controls are explained in Teams Meetings 2026: The New Interface and How to Use It.
- Microphone and noise suppression: You choose the microphone under Settings, Devices, or during a meeting via the arrow next to it. According to Microsoft the levels are Auto (the default), High, Low and, depending on your version, Off. Leave it on Auto and change it only if your test recording sounds muffled or choppy, or if too much noise gets through in an open-plan office. «High» does not run on every device.
- Voice isolation: A separate feature for the open-plan office, with a voice profile that you record once (section «Recognition»). According to the Microsoft roadmap, the profile is also used for speaker recognition and transcripts. Only record the profile once IT has cleared this with data protection or compliance (notes for IT). If the entry is missing, it is not available to you.
- Unmute briefly: Hold Ctrl and Space (Mac: Option and Space), release and you are muted again. Check in the settings under «Privacy» that the option is switched on.
- Preview and video effects: In the preview before you join you check microphone and camera. You find blur and backgrounds there and, during the meeting, under the video effects.
- Hide self-view: Hover over your own tile and hide your picture for yourself in the menu («Hide for me»). This works only locally, the others can still see you.
- Pause notifications: The «Do not disturb» shortcut is described in the Teams tip on working with more focus (from 2023, try it in your own client). A function that pauses all notifications is rolling out right now. If the entry is missing, you do not have it yet.
When the technology plays up: rules of thumb and a checklist
When the technology fails, what counts is how you deal with it. Three rules of thumb:
- Weak connection: camera off first, so the sound stays stable (less data traffic).
- Name the glitch briefly and carry on: «My picture is frozen, I am switching the camera off, the sound stays on.»
- Important appointments: join early and know a fallback: the dial-in number in the invitation (only there if the person who sent the invitation has Audio Conferencing) or a mobile device, if your policies allow it.
Copy the checklist into OneNote or Loop and go through it before every client call. It takes two minutes once the set-up and the sentences are in place:
- Headset on, right microphone selected
- Test recording listened to
- Noise suppression checked
- Camera at eye level
- Light from the front
- Self-view hidden, if it bothers you
- Notifications paused
- Joined three minutes early
- Opening in four sentences ready
- Closing sentence with decisions ready
Evidence or not? According to summaries, controlled experiments show that poor sound lowers how speakers are judged (PNAS 2025) and a large preregistered study shows that looking into the camera and a higher camera come across better (Fauville et al. 2022, staged still images). The study on camera and fatigue (Shockley et al. 2021) was a field experiment in a single US company, based on self-report. I know the studies from summaries, not from the full texts and none of them comes from Switzerland. What has not been studied is whether sound or picture weighs more and I know of no robust study on clothing in video meetings. The set-up steps including the time estimates, the camera agreement, the opening and closing sentences and the checklist are practical rules.
Exercise for your team: What do three minutes of sorting out the technology cost in a weekly team meeting with eight people? Three minutes times eight people is 24 person-minutes per meeting and over 52 meetings that comes to about 1,250 minutes, just over 20 hours a year. Enter your own hourly rate in the meeting cost calculator and show the result to your team. You can practise whether a meeting is needed at all in the learning game Channel Compass (meeting or message?) and there is more on the fewer meetings page.
If you want to practise how you come across in Teams together, get in touch: in a free intro call we will look at what suits your team.
