To ask, if you work remotely/from home do you worry about your Teams status going yellow/'Away'

I have a jiggler, it was the best £8 I ever spent! 🤣

I looked at the jigglers on Amazon, I think I will get one too.

I thought about getting one of these ☺️

we have to be available to speak to colleagues and external clients during core hours

I used to carry my mobile phone round with me when I had this - yes I've taken calls when I was in the shower after a lunchtime run! But you can't really do that with a laptop

I don't think you can - at least not with the new Teams.

I've never even noticed it change, let alone worried about it.

My job can involve long spells on the phone so it wouldn't matter anyway. Plus my manager is not a control freak or an arsehole, so she wouldn't think anything of it. And sometimes I can spend quite a while going through case papers that are actual paper!

She may be different with my colleague who has a caseload a fraction of mine but does 40% more hours though.

Not read the whole thread so someone has probably already suggested it, but just change the timeout before it goes into away status.

I did at the beginning. But soon Worked out that people are too busy to be paying too much attention. 2 years in and I’m doing school runs, exercise class at lunch time (travel time plus class takes an hour and a half). No ones mentioned it to me once….. we also do visits so sometimes I tag lunch/ chores onto that.

tbh when I work from home I have frequent breaks - think pomadero technique- that’s how I work best.

m imagine if how often your thing would go yellow in an office- I reckon it would be more than at home x

This option appears to have been removed in the new version of Teams.

As has saving chats (some employers, maybe most of them delete chats after a certain number of days so you needed to save posts if you didn't want to lose them. Microsoft has removed that functionality in its wisdom).

The new Teams is a nuisance in more ways than one!

Exactly. I have the kind of job that's mostly measured on output and hitting deadlines but we have to be available to speak to colleagues and external clients during core hours.

It is frowned upon and noticed by management if you are unavailable without explanation (eg in a call with an external client or a meeting, which needs to be logged in the online diary) or don't answer when called.

It would be interesting to know what seniority level people are at / what salary they earn alongside whether they worry about being monitored or not.

I'm not suggesting people answer this I'm just saying it would be interesting to know as I'm guessing there's correlation between lower paid roles being more closely watched
In general the people I know who are paid for delivering on projects or have some responsibility don't seem to care about their Teams status because they're working well and don't want to be in a position where they attend a meeting with clients, colleagues, manager and look useless and incompetent. They work in a way that allows them to get the job done. Their colleagues aren't likely to care either.

My friend who complains a lot about their colleagues disappearing for long periods of time (because it impacts friend's ability to do their job) are in more junior jobs where being at the computer, responding to emails, completing lots of smaller tasks is the job. My friend is also reasonably junior and it annoys them that there was talk of increased monitoring from management because there's obviously some people skiving. It's annoying for them that they have tasks they want to complete by 5pm but they know that certain colleagues are never contactable after 3pm.

Install an autoclicker if it looks at mouse movement.

I never even think about it. No one cares! Who would be watching?

That's now my view on it.

I used to worry with an old line manager - just because I knew she was quite meticulous on everything and I was her first person she'd properly line managed so initially she was very keen (it settled down and she was absolutely lovely once she knew I was absolutely fine and on it all). My current line manager - nope I don't worry at all about it because she's very laid back and we both know that our working patterns are variable but neither of us take the piss. I tend to use my outlook diary as a bit of a to-do list and block times for tasks out so it's usually clear what I'm working on anyway - and since I started doing that half of the team has followed.

Plus our work is such that we can be in and out on visits and moving between sites so we're all on and off amber like mad for that kind of reason alone.

It is worth noting that being permanently on green might raise more suspicion than having occasional yellow periods.

😂

It would be interesting to know what seniority level people are at / what salary they earn alongside whether they worry about being monitored or not.

I'm not suggesting people answer this I'm just saying it would be interesting to know as I'm guessing there's correlation between lower paid roles being more closely watched.

Put something small and heavy on the escape key, we call it the golf ball trick.
I have a full size keyboard and separate big screen so the golf ball works better on the big keyboard rather than the keyboard on the laptop.
It shows you as continuously "green" as long as the escape key is depressed.

Also, present your screen to nobody and set your status to available (instead of presenting). Keeps it green permanently.

Source: a member of staff I fired.

I have a very relaxed boss who I know couldn't tell you what status I was in 99.999% of the time and if he did and he saw yellow he wouldn't care. So no I don't. I am also the same with the staff I manage. I see them as adults who can manage their day/workload as they see fit.

The influencers you see, could have very relaxed bosses like mine, make up the hours somewhere else (maybe by working into the evening), have one of those mic wigglers or are just lying.

Not mine. I was just thinking about the OP

I'm responsible for a team of circa 30 people. I haven't got time to monitor any of the their Teams status, however I do notice when work isn't delivered on time. Focus should be on outputs, not whether someone's mouse is moving all day (mine definitely doesn't as I spend so much time in meetings!).

I had a manager who was obsessed with Teams statuses. To save her constantly moaning I just went into a call with myself (I sent a calendar invite and then kept scrolling back to the same one and joining the call). Thankfully she didn't last long.

if you’re using a mouse jiggler just remember to unplug it or you’ll have a colleague mention how late you were working last night!

And I absolutely refuse to work if monitored by 'time' or any software; that takes wfh to a different level. Without any 'office running costs', some employers expect to oversee their employees as if they were present and sucking up office overheads. Which they don't.

Conversely, most jobs really do require some 'presenteeism', and since covid there's been a lot of piss-taking from all sides. Meanwhile the desperately seeking employment people are easy meat for the new-'employer'/charlatans, sucking what they can whilst producing nothing.