Microsoft Teams Will Start Tracking Office Attendance
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Microsoft TeamsRemote WorkEmployee MonitoringProductivity Tracking
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Microsoft Teams
Remote Work
Employee Monitoring
Productivity Tracking
Microsoft Teams is introducing a feature to track office attendance, sparking debate about remote work, employee monitoring, and the role of technology in the workplace.
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I guess you can always use the web version via a VPN or something. I doubt it can deal with that.
I’m not sure who would really care about this feature.
We can usually tell based on your background. And the people that have to be in office are tracked typically with badge swipes. And if you’re really that determined to work remote and your company doesn’t support it, wouldn’t it be better just to find a company that does rather than sneaking around?
Some are doing RTO. Most people are coming back. Some are quitting and finding other jobs. And that’s fine for both parties.
Nobody is sticking it to anybody.
Not really. Decent tele-conference platforms can automatically replace your background. I have a corporate-provided background in google meet, for example.
> And the people that have to be in office are tracked typically with badge swipes.
Often badges are just for automatic doors, not really connected to any real information / data collection system. Not all companies are data-collecting monsters. The company I work for, as an example, has no badges at all (but has people at the reception).
> And if you’re really that determined to work remote and your company doesn’t support it, wouldn’t it be better just to find a company that does rather than sneaking around?
Agree on this.
But the sad truth is that not everybody has all the necessary degrees of freedom to do that.
I might (and I would). But then again, I'm 33, single, no spouse and no kids. I don't have those responsibilities and I can take the risks. People with kids for example would be (understandably) more cautious.
Plus, in the EU, it is unlikely to be legal to use badge-swipe data for attendance tracking (I think this is prevailing opinion rather than legally tested so far).
My cynicism makes me think it’s the latter.
Even if the charitable interpretation was Microsoft's intent, managers put a lot of weight behind the Team's status icon.
Not condoning cheating - the point about just finding another job is it might not be that easy for people depending on what they do, what industry it's in, the number of jobs accessible to them at any given time, or average for those skills.
Sounds like this was written by someone who thinks they're being sneaky by fucking off at work. They already know. Badge swipes and 1000 other ways.
That being said, I feel like complaining about Teams. Who else is frustrated by its unusually short idle timer? Setting my status to “Away” after only five minutes just makes me look bad. There are definitely managers who somehow think that an 8 hour workday actually means 8 hours of continuous activity. Why can’t this be changed or configured to some other span of time? I wouldn’t complain about 15 minutes.
I got around this by downloading a program called caffeine. There are some other workarounds like preparing to start a fake call, or by entering a PowerPoint presentation and then alt-tabbing away from it.
Brother, there is not enough alcohol in the world.for this conversation.
The jab being something to the effect of "imagine being the group that built a tool to help people work remotely and then it sucks so hard everyone has to come back into the office anyway"
A friend who works internally then remarked to me that apparently the person leading Microsoft's AI efforts cried and whined hard enough that his org was allowed to "use Slack instead"
Really the people I feel for are the MSN Messenger engineers. They built something beautiful nearly 30 years ago and watched Microsoft ruin it, kill it with another product they had already ruined (Skype) and then bury the whole lot by building that Electron monstrosity over their unmarked graves
Not yet. Whenever you feel “this doesn’t affect me” about anything, just pause and think “if my situation was different, would I feel differently about it?”. If the answer is yes, you should react the same way as if you’re affected by it.
> Now, do not take this as advice to do the same! It’s highly likely that a more advanced application like Teams has a more advanced check going on here, such as making sure your device has an IP address that matches the corporate office network, or checking the MAC address of the router.
Is there any reason you can't spoof literally all of that?
But if your boss really wants to know if you're in the office or not, they can track badge-swipes. That's what my employer does to enforce RTO compliance.
That seems really weird. Why?
If managers can't get badge swipe data (or reporting based on it), are they doing some kind of weird solo RTO enforcement? And if they can't get badge-swipe, why could they get Wifi data?
But then you go to all that trouble and still have to VPN into the office from an IP outside of your office.
1. Do MacBooks even have proper GPS hardware onboard? Honest question.
2. I wouldn't think GPS would actually work very well, given how cavernous office buildings are--no clear view of the sky for GPS. And if you get a GPS signal indoors at home, it shouldn't be too hard to block.
I know smaller companies might not have badging systems that can provide such analytics (or badging systems at all), but the Amazon anecdote smells fishy to say the least.
A computer can't know anything except what the environment tells it, and since you control the environment you can tell it whatever you want.
I think that’s what is being insinuated.
Great. Now the secure VM I use will always appear remote, when I'm in the office.
Teams runs within the VM, as does 100% of the things I'm allowed to use for work. So the "local network" for the VM, is Azure.
The supposed benefit of being in the office is because teams work better in person. If everybody else is at the office, it’s obvious who isn’t there.
We're talking about corporate America here. They say "RTO because teams work better in person" while they simultaneously contradict themselves requiring distributed teams. What really matters is the leader is tall, looks important in suit, and makes the number go up (with stock buybacks if necessary).
Recently, quite a few remote employees were given advanced notice of lay-offs. Myself impacted.
Fast forward a bit. Now I’m training a contractor in another country to do my job.
We are expected to monitor systems 24/7.
RTO is so clearly a scam.
Also shortens the leash on corp debt slaves.
Edit: this is the "enterprise solution", whereas I agree you're right at the margins.
Just like surprise, low Speed Limit signs that provide probable cause to pull over whoever you like.
Teams has it’s own bug-addled system-independent audio settings too, and it completely broke compatibility with my Bluetooth headset device some years ago. Took forever to diagnose. MS can’t help but layer complexity on needless complexity in Teams while allowing this bloatware to continue to harbor extremely obvious and annoying bugs.
Problem is I've worked at places where I don't have admin access to my own machine and it is more common the you'd think.
“Paste with formatting” is a scourge of a “feature.” I can’t recall ever wanting to actually do that.
Reality is, Corp IT has visibility on who is or isn't in the office already, so hyperventilating about Teams adding this capability is moot.
(Am I the only person with wired ethernet on my desk(s)? I gave up on wi-fi during the pandemic due to terrible Zoom performance, and have kept wired ever since - lower latency, lower jitter, no interference, and faster overall.)
Maybe the new bit for Teams is aggregation and tracking. That probably isn't going to have any good effects.
Nothing a little rpi nano running some lightweight VPN and some clever glue code couldn't fix. It isn't terribly difficult to slip into an IDF unnoticed and your IT department is probably disgruntled enough you could work them for a few months and get them to look the other way, anyway.
Really though this is all very exhausting. The media, controlled exclusively by corporate interests, has come up with all kinds of terms to disparage people. Just doing your job and getting by is "quiet quitting", etc. For those that didn't RTO you are probably getting railroaded.
I despise what I read here from pro-RTO posters because they miss the point. The great propaganda dispensed to us that "being the office was necessary" was proven wrong, without loss of generality, during COVID for nearly every cube farm job. It surprised no one when billions of dollars were spent buying news coverage about how RTO "harmed collaboration" and all kinds of other things. If going back to the office is such an amazing productivity boost why do you need nanny software? The answer is simple and we all have known it. It's only about control. We know that majority of capital for VCs comes from extortion level rates for multi-year leases of office buildings. VCs, too, are frauds. All of them. VCs control the C and Vs, C and Vs control the tax cattle.
It's bullshit of the highest order. All corporate work is just a pyramid scheme in different clothes. The sociopaths who run companies (of which I believe anyone who makes it to V or C level displays two or more sociopathic traits) do not like it when their reality distortion field falls apart.
Maybe this is a setup issue within our org, I don't know.
I always despised Teams because it was a shitty chat app.
But now I despise it on an ideological level. So much so that I'm tempted to add something along the lines of "Do not invite me for interviews if your company (or your client's company, if you're a recruiter) uses Microsoft Teams for chat" to my LinkedIn profile.
And don't think it'll be long till teams has built in jiggler detection too