Summary
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The Microsoft Teams toolbar will allow you to pin, unpin, and reorder meeting controls.
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Raise your hand will be located under Reactions to reduce accidental interruptions.
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The Exit button will be separated; The redesign may seem strange, but it is intended to be faster and simpler.
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 so disruptive to the flow of the meeting that it sticks in the recording. Something about stopping a powerful 30-person presentation really gets to you, especially the part where you have to unmute yourself and sheepishly admit that you accidentally pressed the wrong button.
Well, for all those who are afraid of mixing the “raise hand” button with the emoji menu, Microsoft has good news for you. Microsoft is planning a big redesign of the Microsoft Teams toolbar, including hiding the dreaded “raise hand” button so your cat doesn’t accidentally hit it mid-meeting.
Keyword, ‘may’
On the Microsoft 365 roadmap, the Redmond giant recently added a new planned feature. Titled “Microsoft Teams: Redesigned Meetings Toolbar” with roadmap ID 560321, this feature will allow you to pin, unpin, and reorder the controls on your meeting toolbar to your liking.
While that’s pretty cool on its own, Microsoft also hopes to reduce the number of accidental interruptions by including the Raise Hand button in Reactions. Since even Microsoft itself understands the pain people go through when they accidentally press the button, it’s good to see that it’s doing something about it.
Microsoft also says it will make the Leave button “clearly separated” on the right, so it looks like it’s either fixing people accidentally leaving meetings or remedying an issue that people didn’t know how to escape from.
Interestingly, Microsoft completes the Roadmap entry by saying, “It may look 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 that sentence makes it seem like the toolbar redesign may be drastic enough to draw the user’s ire. We hope Microsoft finds an elegant solution that makes everyone happy. We’ll know for sure when Microsoft begins rolling out on desktop and macOS in June 2026.
