Summary
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The Microsoft Teams toolbar will allow you to pin, unpin, and reorder meeting controls.
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Raise Hand will be placed under Reactions to reduce accidental interruptions.
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The release button will be released; the redesign may look strange, but it aims to be faster and easier.
Accidentally raising your hand in an online meeting isn’t the most embarrassing thing you can do in Teams, but it’s so easy to do and disrupts the flow of the meeting so much that it stays with you. Something about interrupting a powerful presentation with 30 participants really gets to you, especially the part where you have to turn up the volume and bravely admit you pressed the wrong button.
For all those who fear confusing the “Raise your hand” button with the emoji menu, Microsoft has some great news for you. Microsoft is planning a major redesign of the Microsoft Teams toolbar, which includes the dreaded “raise your hand” button so the cat doesn’t accidentally touch it during a meeting.
Key word, ‘may be’
In the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, the Redmond giant recently added a planned new feature. titled “Microsoft Teams: The meeting toolbar has been redesigned” With roadmap ID 560321, this feature will allow you to pin, remove, and reorder the controls in your meeting toolbar as you wish.
While this is pretty cool on its own, Microsoft hopes to reduce the number of accidental interruptions by adding a Raise Hand button under Reactions. Even considering how aware Microsoft is of the pain people go through when they accidentally press a button, it’s nice to see it do something about it.
Microsoft also says that it will put the Leave button “clearly separated” on the right, so it sounds like this will eliminate people accidentally leaving meetings, or solve the problem where people don’t know how to escape.
Interestingly, Microsoft wraps up its Roadmap entry by saying, “It may feel different at first, but it’s designed to be faster and easier to use.” While there are no images or videos of the new toolbar in action, the wording of this sentence might be drastic enough to cause a user’s anger at the toolbar redesign. Hopefully Microsoft will find an elegant solution that makes everyone happy. We’ll know for sure when Microsoft launches on desktop and macOS in June 2026.
