Video: Change Your Background in Teams #
Video Transcript: #
Today’s episode, Changing Your Background in Teams – when the outbreak hit a few months back the talking heads who used to show up on television on Fox and NBC and NSNBC and CNN and ABC and all the others. They stopped showing up. They started Skyping in or Zooming in or coming in via Microsoft Teams.
Rating People’s Home Backgrounds: #
And it was inevitable, I guess, that as these people were showing up on television from their homes that people would start paying attention to those homes. They started analyzing the background what was going on there and an organization called Room Rater popped up. I call it an organization maybe it’s just a guy, I don’t know. It used to be called rate my Skyperoom.com now it’s Room Raters and they show up on social media and they evaluate the living space of these people who show up to analyze the news.
So Dr. Badelia was on one of the channels and they liked her room. They said, “Oh she’s got art, she’s got pillows, she’s got sunflowers, this is a Brooklyn look. We’re going to give her 10 points out of 10. It was a good performance there by Dr. Bedelia.
This guy he didn’t do so well. They slapped him down and said, “You know, what fix your lighting we’re gonna wait for the sequel we’ll re-rate you then. 2 points out of 10.
So if it was inevitable that people were going start doing this it was also inevitable that the talking heads themselves would start competing and jostling each other on social media about their scores. I think that’s kind of funny.
Why is it relevant?
Privacy Concerns #
Because Microsoft studied this and found out that almost half of people who are working from home for the first time are really uncomfortable about having their colleagues and associates able to see what’s behind them.
Maybe they they’re working from the kitchen table. They didn’t get a chance to clear this morning’s dishes or last night’s dishes.
Maybe they’re working from their bedroom and they’re very uncomfortable by having people they work with take a look at what the inside of their bedroom looks like and I can’t blame them.
So Microsoft has come up with backgrounds that you can use. This office of mine here, it’s not mine, Microsoft gave it to me. Thanks fellas. So we can change how that background looks.
Changing the Teams Background Demonstration #
So I’m gonna show you a different part of my screen here, so you can now see what I’m seeing. And the Teams toolbar which shows up whenever you move your cursor. Has these three dots, the technical term for this, actually it’s not a techy term, the English major term for this is an “eclipses.” I call it the three dots.
And we hit the three dots and we come up and right in the middle here, it says show background effects. Let me click on that. A window pops up on our right and enables you to change how people see you. I can get rid of background effects all together and you can see my bedroom behind me. I’m not gonna let you.
We can go over here and click on the blurred background, this will enable you to, let’s apply it, to blur what the background looks like.
We can work from a locker room if we want to I don’t know why I’m not sure this is a locker room, but that’s what looks like to me.
Microsoft gives us a couple of of homey looks we can say all right, well this is, this is where I’m working from in the house today. Or this is where I’m working from the house today.
You can go whimsical, if you’re a whimsical type of person. I’m not a whimsical type of person, but if you’re a whimsical type of person, you could do something like this. They’re gonna let you do it. Me, I wouldn’t be quite dead in a meeting looking like this, but that’s that’s me. You can put a nice bridge behind you if you like, a fake one.
So you’re limited by the number of defaults that Microsoft makes available to you.
Until you come to the third series of our webinar and we show you how to get your geek and we’ll show you how to bring in your own pictures for this, for example. I can finish this meeting from the Oval Office, if I want to.
Changing your backgrounds is something that makes people a little bit more comfortable having live video meetings with business associates, with customers, with vendors, with others, we hope that helps.
