How to get notification badges on the MS Teams "Team" Icon

Question

We get notification badges for most of the lefthand nav icons in Teams letting me know that I have unread or unacknowledged messages, but I don't any for "Teams" messages. We have to open the "Teams" section to see if there are unread messages in any of our teams channels.

This results in a lot of messages to being missed, so much so that a lot of our teams are doing all their messaging on our standup meeting chat channel, because notification badge show up on the Chat icon. Is there a fix for this? Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi Micah,

What you’re experiencing with the Teams section in Microsoft Teams is a common issue—unlike the Chat section, the Teams icon doesn’t always display a notification badge for unread messages unless certain settings are enabled.

Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you're getting proper notifications for Teams channel activity:

1. Turn on channel notifications manually:
   • Go to the Teams section.
   • Click the three dots (...) next to each team or channel.
   • Select Channel notifications > Set to All activity (or Custom and enable banners and feeds).
2. Check global notification settings:
   • Click your profile picture > Settings > Notifications.
   • Under the Teams and channels section, adjust your preferences to ensure you’re notified of new activity.
3. Pin important channels: Pinning channels helps you keep track of key messages. You’ll still need to enable notifications per channel to get badges or alerts.

Unfortunately, Teams doesn’t show a red badge on the Teams icon itself by default for every unread message—unlike the Chat icon. Microsoft has received feedback on this, and hopefully, future updates will offer more consistent notification behaviour.

In the meantime, encouraging team members to enable channel notifications can help reduce missed messages.