Zoom: How to Always Show the Meeting Controls

When you’re in a Zoom meeting, you generally have your microphone enabled and potentially a webcam too. As pretty much everyone will experience at some point during a meeting, life happens in the background, and you may suddenly need to interact with the meeting controls and not have the time to have to look for the mute microphone or disable webcam button. Having these controls, as well as the rest of the meeting controls constantly visible is helpful.

The main two personal meeting controls are the audio and video controls in the bottom left of the Zoom meeting window. These two buttons allow you to mute your microphone and disable your webcam with one click each. You can also click on the expansion arrow to configure which devices you want to use for audio and webcam input and audio output. If you’re the meeting host, you’ll also have the “Security” control which allows you to configure certain participant permissions and to enable features such as the waiting room for the call.

The “Participants” control lets you see a list of the meeting participants on the right of the meeting window and copy the meeting invite link. The “Chat” control opens the meeting chat room on the right of the meeting window. The “Share Screen” control allows you to choose how to share your screen. The “Record” control allows you to record a copy of the meeting. The “Reactions” control allows you to display one of six emoji in the corner of your webcam.

To have all of these controls automatically visible at the start of and throughout every meeting, you need to go into Zoom’s settings by clicking on your user icon in the top-right corner, then clicking “Settings”.

Once in the settings, tick the check box labelled “Always show meeting controls”, which can be found as the seventh setting down in the “General” tab.