Do people realize your boss and colleagues can see how long you’ve been offline?

[Anonymous]

Having been both a "worker bee" and a "manager," there's a disconnect here that I think is really common.

When you are a manager, you think of "work" as being available. Work is sending and receiving emails, attending meetings, talking to people on the phone, etc. You may have some head-down work when you write reports, but the vast majority of your day is spent on communication, trouble-shooting, and delegation.

A lot of worker bees have the opposite workload. The vast majority of their work time is creating actual work product -- writing, data entry, editing/reviewing, etc. Work like this requires chunks of time where you are NOT looking at email or talking to people. Those things can get in the way, or can significantly slow you down. A worker bee who is on Teams or Slack all day long is likely neglecting their work, chatting with colleagues or procrastinating.

When I manage teams of people, I encourage them to identify chunks of their day for dedicated time to create work product, and to put these times as "unavailable" on their calendars to protect them from meeting requests. I schedule team meetings in a way that accommodates having "head down" time to get work done, and I check in with people when I see deadlines aren't being met or quality of work is not up to par, to see if the issue may be insufficient time to work.

When I was a worker bee, it was very common for me to take my actual work home with me at night and on the weekend, because my days were so filled with meetings, admin, colleagues and managers dropping by to chat, getting pulled into someone else's projects for a time, etc. I eventually wised up and realized that I needed to prioritize my actual work, which meant shutting my door more often, telling people I was busy, marking time as unavailable on my outlook, and staying of internal comms for chunks of the day.

[Anonymous]

the reliability of teams/ outlook on showing this is highly suspect at my agency. But if it is where you work, unless you’re their supervisor, how is this your business?

[Anonymous]

I don't get Teams - we use Google. Does "Online" just mean that they're not staring at their email? What if they're doing actual work?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I never use my Teams except for meetings, so I'm always offline. I need the retention of email for my work, but I'm online all the time and very responsive.

It isn’t just teams.

Outlook tracks when you offline.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well you’re “online,” but you’re on DCUM. So there’s that.

A huge part of my work is writing. I deliberately stay off of email/Slack, etc., during focus time.

Touché.

But I average 10 hour days and often get pulled into meetings late at night and weekends.

Seeing worker bees offline for significant chunks of the day is problematic.

I look like I am online right now and I am out to lunch. Are you sure you know exactly what people are up to?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't get Teams - we use Google. Does "Online" just mean that they're not staring at their email? What if they're doing actual work?

Pretty sure outlook tracks if you are on your computer. It tracks if your computer is on and you are logged in. You don’t need to actively be checking email…just be on your computer.

So when it says you are offline, it means your computer is off.

It’s a big tell.

[Anonymous]

Of course I realize that. It's why I have a mouse mover.

[Anonymous]

I agree OP- it is suspicious and I refresh often. I run a lot of data reports that can take 3 to 5 minutes and sometimes longer when I’m home to load. I fill in with emails and DCUM.

DH travels for work so I manage everything at home most weeks. My boss/ subs know I flex hours and work some of weekends. I allow the same flexibility. I have one employee who is young and lives alone and would prefer to work from 11 to 7. I have another who has two young children who prefers to work from 6 to 2 PM. I try to schedule meetings mid day, but they know if we need to schedule outside of that they need to be available.
I do think it is disrespectful to not show on Teams until 3 hour beyond reg start time without acknowledging it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well you’re “online,” but you’re on DCUM. So there’s that.

A huge part of my work is writing. I deliberately stay off of email/Slack, etc., during focus time.

Touché.

But I average 10 hour days and often get pulled into meetings late at night and weekends.

Seeing worker bees offline for significant chunks of the day is problematic.

Well then stop looking. Problem solved.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well you’re “online,” but you’re on DCUM. So there’s that.

A huge part of my work is writing. I deliberately stay off of email/Slack, etc., during focus time.

Touché.

But I average 10 hour days and often get pulled into meetings late at night and weekends.

Seeing worker bees offline for significant chunks of the day is problematic.

I look like I am online right now and I am out to lunch. Are you sure you know exactly what people are up to?

If you emailed a time sensitive request to someone and didn’t get a response in a timely manner and noticed they’d been offline since yesterday afternoon, what would you think?

Have you been online at all today? Presumably so. NBD.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I never use my Teams except for meetings, so I'm always offline. I need the retention of email for my work, but I'm online all the time and very responsive.

It isn’t just teams.

Outlook tracks when you offline.

This doesn't always work when you use browser-based Office. If I'm docked at work, I use the Outlook application and you can see I'm online. I have two monitors in the office so I can put Outlook in the corner of one screen and monitor email that way.

But when I work remotely, like today, I'm just on my laptop or will occasionally use my laptop and another screen for certain work tasks. But it's easier for me to just use the browser version of Outlook so that I don't have to get on the VPN, and it doesn't show my availability.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Any chance your colleagues think today is a holiday? (Veterans Day observed?)

Nope. It’s not a holiday for us.

Plus, this is becoming the new normal on Thursday afternoons/Fridays.

If people keep this up, I’m confident we will be dragged back into the office everyday.

People aren’t working.

If they have kids, their kids are off.

[Anonymous]

Everybody is going after OP with this MYOB, "why do you care?" stuff. But OP said they are concerned that this is the kind of thing that will get everyone pulled back into the office -- and they are correct about that. That would be a huge concern for me too. If OP can notice this, surely higher ups can too. I'd be mad as hell if I were doing what I was supposed to do with WFH, and no one else was and the result was RTO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My TEAMS will show I’m offline when I am actively working. It’s not fool proof

Also when I’m on a phone call, that’s not through Teams. Which I get a lot of.

I’d stop looking at people’s statues. Focus on responsiveness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Having been both a "worker bee" and a "manager," there's a disconnect here that I think is really common.

When you are a manager, you think of "work" as being available. Work is sending and receiving emails, attending meetings, talking to people on the phone, etc. You may have some head-down work when you write reports, but the vast majority of your day is spent on communication, trouble-shooting, and delegation.

A lot of worker bees have the opposite workload. The vast majority of their work time is creating actual work product -- writing, data entry, editing/reviewing, etc. Work like this requires chunks of time where you are NOT looking at email or talking to people. Those things can get in the way, or can significantly slow you down. A worker bee who is on Teams or Slack all day long is likely neglecting their work, chatting with colleagues or procrastinating.

When I manage teams of people, I encourage them to identify chunks of their day for dedicated time to create work product, and to put these times as "unavailable" on their calendars to protect them from meeting requests. I schedule team meetings in a way that accommodates having "head down" time to get work done, and I check in with people when I see deadlines aren't being met or quality of work is not up to par, to see if the issue may be insufficient time to work.

When I was a worker bee, it was very common for me to take my actual work home with me at night and on the weekend, because my days were so filled with meetings, admin, colleagues and managers dropping by to chat, getting pulled into someone else's projects for a time, etc. I eventually wised up and realized that I needed to prioritize my actual work, which meant shutting my door more often, telling people I was busy, marking time as unavailable on my outlook, and staying of internal comms for chunks of the day.

I get what you are saying, but it’s not just teams.

If outlook says you’ve been offline for 15+ hours at 10am, then your computer has been powered off.

And very few people in my office do work that doesn’t involve a computer. In fact, we bring our laptops to in person meetings. Paperless office.