Anyone else snoop on MS Teams Last Online?

[MicrosoftTeamsTwat]

Obvs inspired by an active thread where the poor MNetters DH is being taken for gross misconduct as he’s been found to be not logged in for +2hrs a day…

I will admit to often looking on my ahem less performing team members when they go amber on WFH days and it’s always ‘LAST SEEN 2 HOURS AGO’ at like 3pm in the afternoon, and it’s always the same people consistently throughout the day, they must work (be green/red) 3 hours max a day…and I always wonder how they get away with it - although if the other threads anything to go by perhaps no one will for much longer.

Will absolutely caveat this post with the fact that I definitely sometimes take a slightly longer lunch, and also put the washing out, see you chores and generally make the most of WFH on those days but genuinely I’m never offline more than an hour a day, so I do get a bit peeved that my team mates just seem to get away with it.

Sooo..

YANBU: Everyone checks their lazy colleagues last online and wouldn’t be sad if they were pulled up on it
YABU: Be prepared to suck up others workloads as companies aren’t pulling up their employees..

How do you do this?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have my lights turned off. Why doesn’t everyone do this? Buggered if I’m playing that game .

I work in a team where TEAMS is a good measure of output as we need that to be running for our phone system to work.
If you’re away on TEAMS it changes you to away on the phone system and you don’t get allocated incoming calls.

We do have one or two members of the team that love to slack off when WFH. This has lead to a big lack of trust within the team and there’s a lot of watching what others are doing which is really quite sad.

It’s become quite the toxic team due to these one or two people, unfortunately we don’t have a hands on manager who is willing to properly address the situation with these two so there’s never ending griping and bitching in the team.

I absolutely hate it and want out as soon as possible. In our case it’s the lack of robust management that is causing the problem as the slackers know they’ll just keep getting away with it.

Exactly.

Sorry I’ve been offline - I have been working I promise 🤭

Unsure how everyone else’s systems work, but ours is ‘online’ whether your in teams or not and I’ve never encountered issues with mine, unless my wifi has issues.

My employer is heavily unionised and doubtful anyone would get the sack but I’m sure it’s used by senior managers as an indicator for the slackers, and perhaps a trigger for improvement plans whether they mention it or not.

One of my loveliest male colleagues, who before covid would often disappear for ages if senior leaders were not around (bookies) and also go home at 3pm - his face PALED when I mentioned people going amber when not working - he hadn’t a clue it did that and shit himself that people could know, so obvs spent an awful lot of time skiving.

My counterpart (whom I had in mind when I started this thread) in the department I work for is also chronically offline - consistently last seen 2 hours ago our outputs are vastly different and it’s not hard to notice…

I don't understand how people have separate computers?

Because not everyone has your job.

Mumsnet is so funny, sometimes, assuming everyone has the same adminny/desk-based/"typing" women's job.

Half the posts on this thread only make sense if you believe everyone has basically that job.

It would never have occurred to me, and in any case that is not how we use MS Teams. When it works as it is a sub-standard application in my opinion.

In terms of tracking key strokes, presumably they can only do this on their own equipment as it must be some kind of software? Anyone know.

I think I might start using my own laptop instead as this stuff grinds my gears. I’m another one who does the work but doesn’t worry about the hours

It isn't accurate. It's more accurate on the Teams app, but not at all on the browser version - it only registers you present if you have the Web page open and active. So if your app isn't opening/ working and you're using it online it will show you as away unless you're actively using Teams.

Also, if my colleagues are delivering on their tasks and meeting deadlines while wfh, then I treat them as adults and trust them to use their time as they see fit. I'd only question their 'presence' on Teams if I already had concerns about how they're performing. I myself will sometimes dip out for a couple of hours, for example school appointments, and make up the time either early morning or late evening to ensure work is completed.

What is so hard for you to understand about jobs being different?

Not everyone does every part of their work on "the" company machine. Plenty of roles require use of multiple machines. Teams is also notoriously inaccurate recording last active time.

Oh and I set up meetings with myself - its the only way to get time and peace to do concentrated pieces of work. I also regularly set Teams to "away" for the same reason.

If you have so little to do that you are monitoring your co-workers you might find it helpful to ask for more work. IME this only arises where people are generally short of stuff to do.

I always think this on threads about work on here! There seems to be an assumption that everyone has a job where you need to be at your desk logged into a computer from 9-5 and if you aren’t then you’re slacking and letting the team down.

I have a job where even when I’m in the office I might be away from my computer for the entire day doing manual work. I sometimes come in late, sometimes work very late into the evening. I go out and meet with people, go carry out research in different places, attend lectures and events etc all as part of my ‘working day’. And then sometimes I’m at my desk fiddling with boring spreadsheets and showing Green on Teams all day, but those are definitely not the only days when I am truly working!

Everyone in our team works flexibly so as long as we hit billing targets and keep clients happy noone cares if you take a long lunch break or clock off early or take 20 mins randomly in the middle of the afternoon

Plus sometimes people are doing long chunks of document review or drafting and might choose to do that on paper, so not looking at their screen doesn't mean they aren't working

I think micromanaging people who are delivering the work is really unhealthy but if course if their are productivity issues then employers wouldn't be unreasonable to start to look at things like employees vanishing

If your managers are using "amber" as an indicator of working rather than work outputs and quality of work then they are incompetent and are the staff who need replacing.

This would make me nervous as sometimes people show as offline or away when they are not. We have IT issues too and have to log off and back in and it isn't our fault. I think it's a very lazy and unreliable way to snoop.

You should be looking at the work people are doing instead. If you are a manager and have no idea what your team does, it says more about how much work you do as a manager than your team. If you have to snoop to find out, you probably aren't working that hard yourself.

I have colleagues who do this. I've avoided contacting them on Teams as I thought they hadn't opened it. It's not good for communication.

I don't think it really works unless your job only involves online sessions. If I'm sitting with a client, I might present or might have my laptop off to chat properly. If I'm designing a solution, then I might be sitting on the sofa with blank paper drawing ideas. Conversely if I'm checking my calendar from my phone over breakfast or at the school gates and forget to switch off work apps, my phone's connection would show me as online for hours when I'm not working.

It's fairly easy to tell who is getting work done versue who is lazy, based on output. I don't actually care if my team go away for 45 min to do something anyway, I care if they deliver or not.