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Facilitate group work by creating breakout rooms and assigning participants to each room.

Quick reference

Breakout Rooms

Create breakout rooms and assign meeting participants. 

When to use

We create breakout rooms whenever we want to enable small group work in a meeting. 

Instructions

Breakout rooms are one of the newer features to be added to Teams. Sometimes, particularly if a meeting has many participants, we might want to split people into groups so they can work on an exercise or task. 

Breakout rooms are essentially mini-meeting rooms. Teams owners can create them and assign participants. Alternatively, we can get Teams to assign the participants automatically to breakout rooms. 

Team owners control the breakout rooms. They can move people around, join any breakout room, open and close the breakout rooms, and post announcements to all rooms. 

Create Breakout Rooms Before the Meeting Starts

  • Open a scheduled meeting from the calendar. 
  • Click Breakout rooms. 
  • Click Create rooms. 
  • Specify how many breakout rooms we need. 
  • Click Add rooms. 

By default, breakout rooms will be given generic names of Room 1, Room 2, etc. We can rename the rooms to make them easier to identify. 

  • Hover the mouse over a breakout room. 
  • Click the three dots. 
  • Click Edit. 
  • Type a name for the room. 
  • Click Save. 
Assign Participants

Now the breakout rooms are created, we need to assign participants. We can do this manually if we want to be specific about who goes in which room or we can get Teams to auto-assign people. 

  • Click Assign participants. 
  • Choose Automatically. 
  • Click Next.

Hints & tips

  • Breakout rooms are only available in the desktop version of Teams and for meetings of up to 300 participants. 
  • Breakout rooms can be created before the meeting starts or while the meeting is in progress. 
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  • 00:04 Breakout rooms are one of the newer features of Microsoft Teams.
  • 00:08 Sometimes in a meeting, particularly one that has lots and lots of participants.
  • 00:13 You might want to enable smaller group discussion or separate participants
  • 00:18 into smaller groups so they can work on an exercise or a brainstorming activity.
  • 00:24 And this is where breakout rooms in Teams can be really useful.
  • 00:29 Now what breakout rooms allow the meeting organizer to do, is basically set
  • 00:34 up multiple mini meeting rooms, and assign participants to those rooms.
  • 00:39 The meeting organizer can manage those rooms, and
  • 00:43 even post announcements to those rooms as well.
  • 00:46 So it's effectively like having a series of meeting rooms and
  • 00:50 having different employees in those meeting rooms, and closing the doors so
  • 00:54 that each one can have a different group discussion.
  • 00:57 Once the activity is over, the meeting organizer can close the breakout rooms and
  • 01:02 bring everybody back to the main meeting.
  • 01:05 And it's worth noting that only meeting organizers on the desktop
  • 01:10 version of Teams can create and manage breakout rooms.
  • 01:13 And breakout rooms that are only available in meetings that have up
  • 01:18 to 300 participants.
  • 01:20 So with all that said, let's dive in and take a look at how breakout rooms work.
  • 01:26 Now you can create breakout rooms before the meeting starts or
  • 01:30 whilst the meeting is in progress.
  • 01:32 So let's take a look first of all at creating them before the meeting starts.
  • 01:37 So in my calendar, I have a sales team meeting scheduled for
  • 01:41 this afternoon at four o'clock.
  • 01:44 So let's double click to open this up.
  • 01:47 Now notice that I have four people invited to this meeting Olivia,
  • 01:52 Jen, James and Ben.
  • 01:54 And if we take a look at our tabs running across the top of this meeting,
  • 01:58 one of them is Breakout rooms.
  • 02:00 So this is where I can come to set up my breakout rooms prior to this meeting.
  • 02:05 So all I need to do here is click on the Create rooms button.
  • 02:09 I can then tell teams how many breakout rooms I want to create.
  • 02:13 Now I'm basically going to have two people in each room.
  • 02:17 And because I have four participants, not including myself as the meeting organizer,
  • 02:23 I'm going to create two breakout rooms.
  • 02:25 Now you could create a lot more than that.
  • 02:27 If we click the drop down, you can select up to 50 breakout rooms.
  • 02:32 So let's say add rooms, and now I have my two breakout
  • 02:37 rooms currently with zero participants in each.
  • 02:42 Notice that on each of these little panels we have three dots which gives
  • 02:46 us access to some more things that we can do with these breakout rooms.
  • 02:51 So I'm going to edit because I want to change the name.
  • 02:54 So we are going to say, that this is for Team A and click on Save.
  • 03:01 Let's do the same for the other one.
  • 03:03 We're going to say edit, and this one is going to be for Team B and click on Save.
  • 03:10 Now once you have your breakout rooms set up and renamed,
  • 03:13 you are then going to want to assign participants to the rooms.
  • 03:17 So if we click the assigned participants button just above,
  • 03:21 we're going to get two options.
  • 03:23 We can choose to let teams assign people automatically, or we can assign manually.
  • 03:30 Now the automatic option here, means that Teams is just going to randomly
  • 03:34 look at your participants and assign them to different rooms.
  • 03:39 If you want to be very specific about who you have in each room,
  • 03:42 you're going to want to assign manually.
  • 03:45 Now, in this example, I'm going to get Teams to do the hard work for me.
  • 03:49 So let's click on Automatically, and then Next.
  • 03:52 So Teams has now gone away and
  • 03:54 it's assigned to participants randomly to each room.

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