Microsoft Teams Breakout Rooms: How to Use Them for Business

What Are Breakout Rooms in Teams?

Breakout rooms allow a meeting organiser to divide attendees into separate, smaller sessions — all running simultaneously within the same parent meeting. Participants in a breakout room can talk, share screens and collaborate amongst themselves, while the organiser can move between rooms, broadcast announcements to all rooms at once, and pull everyone back to the main session when needed.

The feature was introduced to support remote workshops, training events and large team meetings where splitting into working groups makes sense. For businesses that regularly run structured sessions — project kick-offs, training days, team workshops, client onboarding calls — breakout rooms can materially improve how meetings flow.

Requirements and Licensing

Breakout rooms are available to any user on a paid Microsoft 365 plan that includes Teams. That covers:

• Microsoft 365 Business Basic — £4.60/user/month
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard — £9.40/user/month
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium — £17.60/user/month
• Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 — enterprise plans

The free version of Teams supports breakout rooms with limitations — the organiser must have a paid licence to create and manage rooms. Participants only need to be in the meeting; they do not need a paid Teams licence to join a breakout session.

Breakout rooms require the Teams desktop app or Teams on the web. The mobile app can join breakout rooms but cannot create or manage them.

How to Create Breakout Rooms

During a live meeting, the organiser clicks the Breakout rooms icon in the meeting toolbar. From there, you choose how many rooms to create (up to 50) and whether to assign participants automatically or manually.

Automatic Assignment

Teams distributes participants evenly across the rooms you specify. This is the quickest option for large groups where the division doesn't need to be deliberate. Useful for randomised group exercises or splitting a large team into parallel working sessions.

Manual Assignment

You drag participants into named rooms. This takes more time to set up but gives you full control — essential for structured workshops where specific combinations of people need to work together, or where you want to assign a facilitator to each group.

Pre-Meeting Configuration

Since 2023, organisers can configure breakout rooms before the meeting starts — creating rooms, naming them and pre-assigning participants from the meeting invite. This is particularly useful for recurring training sessions or structured workshops where the groups are known in advance.

Managing Rooms During a Meeting

Once rooms are open, the organiser has several tools available:

• Join any room — move between breakout sessions to observe or assist groups
• Broadcast a message — send a text announcement to all rooms without interrupting their sessions
• Set a timer — display a countdown visible to all participants, signalling when to wrap up
• Recreate rooms — shuffle assignments and reopen if you want to mix groups
• Close all rooms — returns everyone to the main meeting simultaneously

Participants receive a notification when rooms open and have the option to join. If they don't join within a set time, Teams can automatically move them in — a useful setting for large events.

Recording and Transcripts

The main meeting recording does not capture breakout room audio or video. If you need a record of what happens in each room, individual breakout rooms can be recorded separately by the room participant with recording permissions. Each recording is saved to the organiser's OneDrive or the meeting chat.

Transcription works within each breakout room independently, provided transcription is enabled for the meeting. This is worth bearing in mind for training sessions where you want a written record of each group's discussion.

Practical Business Use Cases

Training and Workshops

The most common use case for UK businesses is structured training. An HR team runs an all-hands session, then splits staff into department groups for breakout discussions. A trainer can deliver content to the full room, then divide into smaller groups for exercises, reconvening to share findings.

Client Workshops

Consultancies and agencies often use breakout rooms during discovery workshops — running mixed-group sessions with clients and internal team members to gather requirements across workstreams simultaneously.

Interview Panels

Recruitment processes can use breakout rooms to separate candidates for individual assessments, with interviewers moving between rooms to observe, before everyone returns to a debrief in the main session.

Large Team Meetings

For all-hands meetings with 50+ attendees, breakout rooms give every participant a chance to contribute in a smaller setting rather than sitting passively through a large call.

Known Limitations

A few things to be aware of when planning sessions around breakout rooms:

• External participants (those without a Microsoft account) can join breakout rooms but may have a slightly reduced experience on some device types
• Breakout rooms are not available in channel meetings — only in scheduled meetings or Meet Now sessions
• Each meeting supports a maximum of 50 rooms, with no defined per-room participant limit (though smaller groups are the point)
• Dial-in participants (joining by phone) cannot be placed in breakout rooms

If you need to run large-scale structured events with breakout functionality, it is worth testing your setup ahead of time — particularly if you have a mix of internal and external attendees.

Getting Support with Teams Configuration

AMVIA manages Microsoft 365 deployments for businesses across the UK. If your team is looking to get more from Teams — whether that's breakout rooms, calling features, or security configuration — we can help structure your licence and settings to match how you actually work.