Hey there, I'm Devin!
Most of the time you can catch me deep in the world of internal comms at Workshop (yes, the Happy Mondays folks!), and while I love AI, there are just some comms questions that need a human who really gets it… that’s me!
Hey Devin — We’re a 400+ person company with a really open dialogue culture, which is great for engagement but can sometimes send our all-company meetings sideways when the chat takes off during someone’s presentation. Do you have any guidance on ground rules for meeting chat, or when it makes sense to just turn it off? We use Microsoft Teams, if that’s helpful context.
Oh, I love this one — because it’s really a “too much of a good thing” problem, and those are the best kind to solve (in my opinion!). An open dialogue culture is pretty rare and absolutely worth protecting, so the goal here isn’t to shut chat down, it’s to give it better boundaries.
First, the good news on Teams specifically: everything you’re describing is doable. Organizers can set meeting chat to off, on, or during the meeting only — and that setting can actually be changed mid-meeting, not just locked in ahead of time. So a common pattern I’ve seen work well is turning chat off (or heavily discouraging it) during the CEO’s opening remarks, for example, or a scripted portion, then flipping it on once you hit the more conversational part of the agenda. That shift alone does a lot to signal this part is for listening, this part is for talking — people will pick up on it fast!
Pinning is going to be your other best friend here. You can pin a message to the top of a Teams meeting chat so it stays visible for everyone, the whole meeting. That’s the natural home for a short set of ground rules — things like “save detailed questions for the Q&A” or “tag your manager’s name if this is org-specific feedback” — posted right as the meeting kicks off. We do something similar internally at Workshop before weekly All Hands and quarterly retreats, and it cuts down on the “wait, is this the right place to ask this?” hesitation that can otherwise clutter the chat.
And then there’s the feature I’d actually push you toward if you’re not using it already: Teams has a dedicated Q&A app built specifically for large, structured meetings. It’s separate from the general chat, so questions land in their own space instead of getting buried under commentary and reactions. You (or a co-organizer) can moderate what gets published, and (this is the fun part!!) you can export everything to a CSV afterward. That export is basically a gift for exactly what you mentioned wanting to do: pulling the most common or most upvoted questions and turning them into a follow-up email or podcast segment. Nothing makes people feel heard quite like seeing “here’s what a bunch of you were actually asking” show up somewhere official a week later.
So the shape I’d land on: chat on for the parts of the meeting that are genuinely conversational, pinned ground rules so people self-sort without you having to police it live, and Q&A as the structured outlet for anything that’s an actual question rather than a reaction or a tangent. You’ll probably still get the occasional derail… I mean, that’s just what happens when people feel safe speaking up, but you’ll have given the chat a shape, and that’s most of the battle.
Good luck with it — and if you end up doing that “most popular questions” follow-up, I’d love to hear how it goes!
