Microsoft Teams Will Soon Notify Your Boss When You’re Out of the Office.
The pandemic has proven that many of us can work just fine outside the office. However, companies continue to insist on bringing employees back to their offices—whether through a hybrid work arrangement or a mandatory five-day-a-week presence. In both cases, many companies are looking for ways to hold employees accountable: since many of our work duties can be performed anywhere with an internet connection, unless your boss is monitoring you, it’s not always easy to determine where you’re working.
Your company may have launched initiatives to encourage office attendance. Perhaps your boss is counting your badge usage to ensure you meet your weekly office quota, or you’re required to attend in-person meetings. But it’s not just companies developing such measures. Even Microsoft is trying to make it harder for remote employees to continue working from their preferred location.
How Teams will track where you work
As Tom’s Guide reports , Microsoft Teams will release an update in December that will let you know whether you’re working from a company office. The update notes aren’t detailed, but they do include the following: “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will soon be able to automatically update their workspace with the building they’re working in. This feature will be disabled by default. Tenant administrators will decide whether to enable it and require end users to opt in.”
Judging by the wording, Microsoft intends to make this feature more focused on helping employees find colleagues in large office complexes, rather than denounce employees working from home when they’re not supposed to. This is fair: if I worked for a company with multiple buildings on campus, it would be useful to know where the person I needed to speak with was working that day.
But let’s be realistic. Companies will also use this feature to track their employees and ensure they’re working from their desks. Your manager can check your Teams status at any time, and if it doesn’t show you’re working from one of the company buildings, they’ll know you’re out of the office. No, this feature won’t be enabled by default, but if your company wants it, your IT department can enable it and require you to do the same.
As someone who worked remotely for most of my professional career, I find the demands to return to the office generally silly. I understand that there are some jobs that can’t be done remotely, and there are aspects that are improved by in-person collaboration. But if the vast majority of your work is done on a laptop connected to the internet, there’s no point in forcing you to work from the office. It also seems demoralizing to treat employees like children, monitoring their whereabouts to ensure they’re doing their work from a pre-approved location. If you get your work done, who cares where it’s done?