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

[Anonymous]

OP claims to care that this behavior will get everyone pulled back into the office, but OP is contributing to cultural attitudes that make in-office work preferable.

The argument for remote work is that if you hire well and trust workers to get their work done, they will actually be more productive (or as productive but personally happier, which leads to retention) if they can work when and where they want. The test for this approach is to set metrics attuned to production -- is work getting done? on time? is it good? are clients happy? are employees responsive? If the answer to all of these questions are yes, then it truly does not matter if people are sitting at a desk looking at their computer screen from 9am to 6pm every day. They are meeting all their goals. The details are not important.

OP is advocating for a more rigid set of expectations where it DOES matter exactly where, when, and how you do your work. This is the argument in favor of in-person work. It assumes that people must work the same schedule and must be logged in and engaged with one another at the same time, in order for work to occur.

You can't argue for the latter scenario and then claim that you are worried about WFH being taken away. You obviously aren't committed to WFH because you have rigid expectations for how work occurs and this will always lean in favor of the office where it's easier to control that.

[Anonymous]

I am someone who is extremely responsive even after hours, but my Teams (our main comms system at work) shows me as idle/offline a lot if I haven't actively used it.

OP, mind ya own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I get work email on my mobile so I look incredibly responsive while I grocery shop.

Point is, for most of what you are complaining about, you really can’t know iff someone is or isn’t working.

So let it go.

It’s terrific that you are responsive on your mobile.

Your boss and colleagues can still tell if you are offline and simply responding from your phone. Outlook will indicate you are offline.

[Anonymous]

Does assigned work get done? If yes, then this bullshit about Teams showing away is meaningless. If no, then address the actual behavior - not getting work done. Your fixation on whether Teams or Outlook is showing someone as present or away is indicative of your inability to manage and lead workers. It's a crutch for your inability to measure the actual work being done (ie, deliverables being timely and of expected quality) and an inability to focus on the actual problems. Learn to do your job well or go back to being an individual contributor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I get work email on my mobile so I look incredibly responsive while I grocery shop.

Point is, for most of what you are complaining about, you really can’t know iff someone is or isn’t working.

So let it go.

It’s terrific that you are responsive on your mobile.

Your boss and colleagues can still tell if you are offline and simply responding from your phone. Outlook will indicate you are offline.

DP. I don't care, nor does anyone I work with. My work gets done, it gets done well, and it gets done quickly. My colleagues care about work product, not what Outlook says.

[Anonymous]

How does teams show the number of hours offline? Mine only shows colors.

Besides I don’t keep teams open bc it’s distracting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How does teams show the number of hours offline? Mine only shows colors.

Besides I don’t keep teams open bc it’s distracting.

Outlook, not teams.

[Anonymous]

I'm so happy my work's IT dept is too incompetent to install any blocks so I have Caffeine installed on my machine that keeps me active for 8 hours each day.

I'm active now but I've really been on the couch watching Hulu all morning. It's dead at work today. 95% of my customers are government and have today off. I've received 3 emails and 0 phone calls. Love that for me.

[Anonymous]

People turn this feature off all the time for focus time.

Even if people get pulled back into the office, I don’t know of any office who is five days a week for professional “knowledge” workers… Everyone I know even in the most strictest “back to the the office” situation is 3 to 4 days a week and Fridays are almost universally WFH days. So pulling people back in really wouldn’t solve this problem you described unless they really want to get rid of top talent and require five days a week which no one is doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does assigned work get done? If yes, then this bullshit about Teams showing away is meaningless. If no, then address the actual behavior - not getting work done. Your fixation on whether Teams or Outlook is showing someone as present or away is indicative of your inability to manage and lead workers. It's a crutch for your inability to measure the actual work being done (ie, deliverables being timely and of expected quality) and an inability to focus on the actual problems. Learn to do your job well or go back to being an individual contributor.

This is a little simplistic. I have a couple of employees who are not getting work done in anything like a reasonable amount of time. It really does make a difference (at least in the short term) if they are just not working, or if they are working inefficiently. I am trying to figure out how it is taking them so long to do simple tasks but right now I am wasting a ton of my own time giving them additional support and training. If the truth is that rhet are sleeping in and gojng to the movies, I’d be pretty pissed. It does seem like this is an increasing problem — I don’t know if it’s due to remote work or because the younger employees grew up in an educational culture with soft deadlines and lower expectations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does assigned work get done? If yes, then this bullshit about Teams showing away is meaningless. If no, then address the actual behavior - not getting work done. Your fixation on whether Teams or Outlook is showing someone as present or away is indicative of your inability to manage and lead workers. It's a crutch for your inability to measure the actual work being done (ie, deliverables being timely and of expected quality) and an inability to focus on the actual problems. Learn to do your job well or go back to being an individual contributor.

This is a little simplistic. I have a couple of employees who are not getting work done in anything like a reasonable amount of time. It really does make a difference (at least in the short term) if they are just not working, or if they are working inefficiently. I am trying to figure out how it is taking them so long to do simple tasks but right now I am wasting a ton of my own time giving them additional support and training. If the truth is that rhet are sleeping in and gojng to the movies, I’d be pretty pissed. It does seem like this is an increasing problem — I don’t know if it’s due to remote work or because the younger employees grew up in an educational culture with soft deadlines and lower expectations.

This.

The extra time supervisors invest in providing additional training, support, and oversight is exhausting and irritating.

I shouldn’t need to track everything I’m assigning and gauge progress in real time because you aren’t actually working. But I’m labeled as unreasonable if I set realistic timelines that you can’t meet because…you aren’t actually working.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s Friday morning, nearly 11am, and the majority of my colleagues have been offline for upwards of 15 to 24 hours. I can see this in outlook and teams.

Does everyone realize this info is available?

Does anyone care?

I’m tempted to schedule Thursday afternoon and Friday morning meetings just to make sure people are working some hours.

The J1 J2 guy is back.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

ICYMI: it’s not just teams. Outlook tracks when your laptop is on.

Our office ditched landlines and mobile phones. Our work phones are through our laptops.

You are wrong about a couple of things here.

- this is Teams functionality, not Outlook functionality. Outlook displays status, but it’s Teams functionality.

- Teams shows users as online they have Teams open and their computer is connected to the internet. If you close teams (kill the process, not just close the screen) or disconnect from the Internet it will report you as offline. Also, when your computer is sleeping (not just turned off).

[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.

You choosing to average 10 hours a day is your own stupidity. I don’t get “pulled into” meetings unless it is with the highest level of people because I’m not a dimwit who cannot manage my own time.

No one is impressed by your addiction to work, which shows what you lack more than it shows any good qualities you may have. Do better.

[Anonymous]

I override the log off feature on my lap top and when I quit I was on line 525 days 24/7.