This will welcome news to folks who have larger meetings in Teams and utilize the hand-raising functionality: there will soon be an automatic lower of a user’s Raised Hand after speaking.

We’ve all been in meetings (especially when the feature first came out) where folks are nicely using that hand-raising feature (instead of just trying to talk over everybody, which never works in a large Teams meeting). The hand-raising feature is great, and Teams is smart enough to sort the list of who raised their hands by who did it first, making it easier to call on whoever had their hand up first.

But we’ve all seen it: The person will say what they have to say but then they never put their hand down after they’ve talked, so folks still think they have something to say. This feature will hopefully alleviate that annoyance.

Basically, after you speak, Teams will detect it and will prompt you that it’s going to automatically lower your hand. If it still needs to be raised, it will give you that option as well.

It’s on Microsoft’s roadmap to be released over the next month or so and is currently only for the desktop version of Teams.