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..

It means ‘away’ which some may think means you’re not at your computer and therefore not working because you aren’t using Teams. 🙄

I can be sat at my desk doing something and it goes to away because I've not been active on Teams, it doesn't mean I'm skiving.

Again, you’re misunderstanding what that poster was talking about. They weren’t saying they snoop and open documents they shouldn’t.

There’s a feed when you open Office365 that shows you what documents others in your team have recently been working on. This isn’t information you go looking for, it’s offered up to you when you open it. So you could potentially see something like ‘BigBoss opened 2 hours ago’ on a spreadsheet called ‘Team Bonuses’ or similar if your boss doesn’t realise this feature exists and doesn’t set the document’s privacy properly. I do wonder how many people have been caught out by this.

Obviously if you then opened that document you could get in trouble but you can’t be in trouble for simply noticing it exists in your feed.

Mine often turns to amber while I’m right there working on my laptop, but in another application that isn’t Teams. The status isn’t necessarily reliable. I don’t have time to be checking on other people’s status, I might check if I’m waiting for them to join a meeting and they’re late but that’s about it. If they’re not delivering on their responsibilities and it’s impacting your work then speak to your line manager, if it’s not impacting you directly then ignore it - you can only control your own actions.

"I guess we all notice different things here. I often see people saying that someone shouldn’t, say, eat breakfast at their desk because they’re being paid to work during that time. Which is always funny to me because I’ve never had a job where the specific hours I work matter "

Ah, but that's a different thing. The reason why you get a lot of those comments about people eating their breakfasts is that you get a lot of people on MN seeing things through the pov of the employer, and a particularly strict and old fashioned one at that. You see it on the jobs threads. It's not really to do with the kind of jobs people do.

As I said, I have one of those jobs with fixed working hours, but eating a croissant wouldn't be a problem as long as you're available.

"You can also set appointments so that you don’t show as busy I think."

Do you know how to? I don't want to make my colleagues check my calendar as well as just looking at Teams.

Eating at the desk isn't necessarily an issue. (More likely to be a problem for others if it's antisocial smelly food.) I've had work ideas in the bath and other places I definitely haven't been being paid to work, so it goes both ways.

It's perfectly possible to eat and work at the same time if its toast, croissant or banana summat like that. I might be reading through my emails at the same time for example and it's no great shakes to take a bite out of something.

When I add appointments, I usually do it via the Outlook app. There’s an option for ‘show as busy’, ‘show as away’, etc.

You’d love working with me. I print papers and go lie on the sofa that gets the sun and read them, I can’t see my screen in the sun so can’t work there. If anyone wants to think I’m skiving off they can fuck off!