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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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).

And how often are you working without the internet?

Most people login and connect to wifi to access email, even if it’s running in the background/minimized. I never use teams unless I’m on a call, but it pops up if someone is trying to reach me.

If your status is offline for 15 hours, then you haven’t been online. Zero chance you are working without the internet. And who thinks it’s okay to not monitor email or teams all day?

Passively checking email on your phone while you watch Netflix or grocery shop isn’t working. I can’t believe you people don’t get it.

[Anonymous]

Umm...not everyone uses Outlook. Not sure why anyone would, actually. There are much better mail clients.

Some people use multiple computers and only run their mail client and/or Teams and/or Slack on one of them.

Some people do a substantial amount of work that does not require using a computer. Phone calls, filing, etc.

In short, this "status" information is effectively useless at determining whether or not people are actually working. So, it is best ignored.

I do tend to think that the people who push hardest for work-at-home tend to be less productive, but their productivity should be measured by actual work output, not by online/offline status indicators. If availability is important to the job, then that should be measured by actual availability and responsiveness.

Some people are just clueless about technology, I guess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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).

And how often are you working without the internet?

Most people login and connect to wifi to access email, even if it’s running in the background/minimized. I never use teams unless I’m on a call, but it pops up if someone is trying to reach me.

If your status is offline for 15 hours, then you haven’t been online. Zero chance you are working without the internet. And who thinks it’s okay to not monitor email or teams all day?

Passively checking email on your phone while you watch Netflix or grocery shop isn’t working. I can’t believe you people don’t get it.

NP, but my company doesn't use teams or outlook. We use slack and google/g-suite with options to use zoom for external meetings if we want. But anyway, the only way colleagues can know i'm online is slack, which is green when you are online and goes sleep/gray whatever when you are not + some other settings you can customize. Of course IT can monitor anything they want, but they can monitor things that the average boss/coworker can't. OP sounds like a colleague looking at others in the company, in this case, he or she likely can only see the setting the employee controls, and yes, in many applications, you can control that setting.

My boss is almost never green on slack. He's an SVP and works very hard, is very productive, but he for whatever reason just turns his stuff off. Doesn't mean he is never online.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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).

And how often are you working without the internet?

Most people login and connect to wifi to access email, even if it’s running in the background/minimized. I never use teams unless I’m on a call, but it pops up if someone is trying to reach me.

If your status is offline for 15 hours, then you haven’t been online. Zero chance you are working without the internet. And who thinks it’s okay to not monitor email or teams all day?

Passively checking email on your phone while you watch Netflix or grocery shop isn’t working. I can’t believe you people don’t get it.

I get it. I said I can have my system up and running at home and check my email while doing errands. I didn’t say I was working. I said you can’t tell if I’m working by checking if I am online or off or seeing how quickly I respond to your email.

So why are you wasting your energy worrying about something you can’t know?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

+1

[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.

Most employers track key strokes.

[Anonymous]

People just don’t care.

[Anonymous]

I’m not OP but I deal with this a lot too. People are offline or away, don’t respond to emails and don’t get work done on time. We use Outlook and Teams. Our jobs require working with email and calls, no offline filing etc. People just have stopped caring. We’re completely remote since Covid.

[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.

Focus on the product. Set clear expectations with deadlines. Put them on PIPs if they don't meet them. This obsession with Outlook / Teams tracking is a red herring.

[Anonymous]

How are you pulling this info? Are you relying on teams status? I set mine to appear offline permanently. Lol. When asked I just tell people I don’t like chat and this way people email or ping me.

[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.

But what does it matter if they are responsive?

[Anonymous]

We have Skype and there's no way to turn it off. If you try to close it, it gets minimized. So if it shows you as offline, then you're offline (you'd otherwise show as available/away/busy).

I view being offline the same as not being in the office during the old days - unless you've travelled to another work location for official business, you should be on leave. I assume that when my colleagues show offline, they have taken leave or flexed their hours and are "out of office."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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).

And how often are you working without the internet?

Most people login and connect to wifi to access email, even if it’s running in the background/minimized. I never use teams unless I’m on a call, but it pops up if someone is trying to reach me.

If your status is offline for 15 hours, then you haven’t been online. Zero chance you are working without the internet. And who thinks it’s okay to not monitor email or teams all day?

Passively checking email on your phone while you watch Netflix or grocery shop isn’t working. I can’t believe you people don’t get it.

“I can’t believe you people don’t get it” is a strange way to say “Yes, my specific, repeated, incorrect posts about how the tech works were wrong.”

[Anonymous]

If people don’t have enough to do, they need to be cut or more work needs to be assigned.

These days, everyone says they’re swamped. Most aren’t, but it’s a reflexive response that means “leave me alone.” You need to challenge these people and understand what they’re doing and how long it’s taking. If they’re dragging things out, challenge them with more work and tighter deadlines. If they don’t make these, start documenting and prepare to PIP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have Skype and there's no way to turn it off. If you try to close it, it gets minimized. So if it shows you as offline, then you're offline (you'd otherwise show as available/away/busy).

I view being offline the same as not being in the office during the old days - unless you've travelled to another work location for official business, you should be on leave. I assume that when my colleagues show offline, they have taken leave or flexed their hours and are "out of office."

You can log out of Skype. You have to exit through the menu, you can’t just X out of it. You can also modify your status to appear away or offline even when you’re not. I know many people who purposely appear away or offline on Skype so they can actually get work done.