Anyone else snoop on MS Teams Last Online?

Sometimes I set mine to ‘appear away/offline’ when I go for lunch and then sometimes forget to put it back. So if a colleague like you checked my status at 3pm you might see that I’d been ‘away’ for 3 hours when actually I’ve been back at my desk since 1.

Luckily the people I work with don’t give two shits about this kind of thing. Likewise, if I ever noticed a colleague was Orange all day I’d assume they were using a different PC, doing something offline (reading a book/hard copy of a document etc), gone out to consult something at a library/archive or meet someone external, or any number of other things. I’m so glad I have the kind of job where ‘work’ means any of the above and more, rather than where ‘sat at your computer with Teams open’ is the ultimate measure of whether someone is working or not.

Little USB thing you plug in and it moves your mouse cursor 1 pixel every few seconds.

Main use is to make sure a device doesn't lock itself, such as while you're examining a system for illegal materials.

Teams status isn’t always accurate. I sometimes deliberately set my status to ‘Away’ if I’m trying to concentrate on a piece of work. Reason being is because some people do not respect the ‘Do not disturb’ message and ping me with ‘have you got 5 mins?’ (which is never 5 mins). I have a large team and it happens all the time and if I allowed all these (5 min) conversations, I’d never get any work done.

I go by output as the measure of work. There are people on green all day who are probably just scrolling the net because their output doesn’t equal a FT week.

You don’t understand that not all companies are the same. These days many require you to use your own device. Some jobs don’t involve classified documents and don’t need security. There are a lot of reasons.

It’s all so messed up. Has anyone else read the Cal Newport book ‘Deep Work’? He argues that this sort of measure of productivity is actually really damaging to employees’ ability to produce actual decent, meaningful work.

Mine goes amber after minutes of Teams being minimised, but doesn’t seem to for the rest of the team! I’ve learnt that if you go into the Teams calendar, click “start a new meeting” but don’t invite anyone into it, and then change your status from “in a call” to “active”, it doesn’t switch to amber when I’m using Word or Excep etc instead.

When did your Teams status become the metric about how active you’re been at work? I use my iPad for Teams and use a monitor for work.

As I’ve already stated, it’s due to their output that this staff member started to be monitored.

I have such mixed feelings on this. I do check who has been away for a long time and if the team is busy I don’t like it. When I’m not busy myself though I do it too - I’m going on holiday and spent a lot of yesterday when I was meant to be wfh tidying/packing instead. The way I see it is that I’m paid to get my allocated work done, I am not paid by the hour, sometimes that means I work way more than my contracted hours and sometimes I work less. I always keep an eye on my emails so if something does come in I can get back to work. I could be more proactive with the time that I have available in work hours by trying to find something to do but it seems a waste of time if it’s not actually necessary work.

So I tend to assume others are doing the same, so long as those I give work to get it done by the deadline and those above/at the same level as me aren’t taking the piss so more work falls on me I don’t care if they log off for half the day. So long as the work is done I don’t care if people have extra free time.

How do you do this?

Are you a manager checking your team members' statuses or are these your peers?

For people I'm managing, the only checking I do is to see if they're meeting the objectives we regularly set together. For my peers it's none of my business what they're doing.

Happens to me all the time!

Luckily my manager trusts us and doesn’t check up on us like this. We have jobs that could mean being away from the computer for several hours at a time but we’re very much doing our jobs. I make sure I keep my calendar up to date so she can see when I’ll be back if she wants to talk to me.

My status will often go to away if I’m doing something else on my laptop. Ringing me anyway will soon prove I’m there!

It's also perfectly possible to get apps/ workarounds that will keep your status on green regardless of whether or not you are at the computer.

It's utterly daft to try and judge someone's productivity by their Teams status.

No I don't check up on my colleagues and I would be very offended if I found out someone other than my manager was doing this to me and judging whether I was working enough.

You have no idea what else they might be juggling and it's frankly none of your business.

It's also nothing to do with working from home - plenty of people in the office sit there scrolling on their phones or not being productive.

It’s another piece of evidence, part of the puzzle when a team member is underperforming. And yes, when I mentioned it as an opening salvo, my team member cheerfully told me he’d ’needed to take his DMIL to the shops’. I suggested that if he was going to do that in peak working hours on the second busiest day of the month then I’d like him to mention it. Amazingly his productivity (and Teams presence) have both upticked.

As someone who can completely legitimately be reading a learned article as part of my role it would never be the only thing but yes, as one triangulation point, absolutely I keep half an eye on it.

We keep an eye on this in my work but also use another time recording system so you can see what work they have completed and when throughout the day. A couple of people are now on performance management for poor time recording.

I'm in a job where you can't work from home so don't really know the ins and outs of Teams but how does it accurately show if you are working? If most of your work is creating documents, or maybe some sort of design programme, how does it monitor this? Or are all the programmes synced to together so it can see when you're actively working on a document?

Either way, snooping at time logged in seems unfair so long as people get the work done.

Yes to all those who say Teams is a very poor tool for showing productivity. I, like others on here use a variety of devices and programmes throughout the day which don't keep Teams active. I spend a stupid amount of time annotating Contracts and DPAs, I use a tablet device for this as I can handwrite and cross out where needed on the pdf which is easier and quicker. I have conference calls on Team, WebEx and Zoom if on WebEx/zoom then Teams shows me as idle/away. I also have calls on my mobile phone. I travel sometimes or have hours long face to face meetings or conferences or in person trainings.

The idea that my productivity or contribution to the company can be even slightly measured by a little orange symbol on an app is ridiculous.

Unless you have a role where Teams is a key system, actively in use 100% of your working hours and you are expected to be sat at your desk to fulfil all aspects of your job, it is a bad metric to use.

We only use teams for meetings a few times a week and contact each other through WhatsApp and email. I wonder what my online status would be for that. Not that my boss would care, he knows I'm working, I'm responsive to any query.

I had a boss who monitored my teams like this, I don't think they realise how close they came to getting a record of bullying. Someone from another department was extremely concerned about me at the time. And very close to intervening.

In the area I work - lots of people do design work on Macs, so actually are probably working their hardest when teams is orange on the pc. Sometimes I'm working on pen and paper, or even a mobile phone. And I'm allowed to take long breaks in the middle of the day as long as they are recorded properly.

Absolutely this. We've had so many IT issues with remote access that I log into Teams on my personal laptop and work on my own laptop. I've also noticed Teams will sometimes say I'm "away" when I'm on the laptop. So definitely not infallible. But I know my organisation monitor my laptop and I imagine that's more reliable.

I imagine there would be other issues with work/output and the Teams / log in stats would be one piece of evidence used to dismiss someone

This is hilarious because it is rarely right, mine said away for like a week and I was there, you can also check your phone and your status will change. Honestly! You need to get busier if you have time to care about this !

For me it wouldn’t be just teams it would be a number of things that would be just one part of it. So people saying they’ve too much work and can’t get through it and whenever I want to contact them they show away/offline then that would be a red flag to start to do some more monitoring.

I manage team and I’ve never checked. We all work remotely, and as long as their work is done and done well I absolutely have no issues with how they choose to manage their time.

Also, as others say Teams is often wrong. I needed our COO the other day. It told me she was free but in fact she was on a teams call already. It’s not that reliable.