Controversial opinion but this is perfectly fine to enable in an enterprise environment. If you’re being paid to work and you’re lucky enough to be trusted to work from home its fine to force employees to have location services enabled. Not like there isnt a million other ways to see where they are.
i’m fine with company property having tracking, but as long as i’m doing my job i don’t see why my employer needs to know were i am. and that’s despite me preferring to work on location.
I work in a big office, I want to know if the person is in office, working from home or offsite somewhere. This feature will automatically update the status to give that info. I dont see how its hard to understand why that is a useful feature. Also I said enterprise environment its assumed these are company devices.
Know why? Because I work with responsible adults. Once you start treating adults like little kids with no agency, you’re opening the floodgates for the control schemes which finally start to affect you personally.
What could your employer do that would overstep your personal boundaries? By handwaving this one away, you’re enabling them to cross your line later. You must see that, yes? It’s clear to everyone else.
You are not doing yourself any service, even if you think you’re just “sitting this one out.”
Im glad that people in your office are responsible enough to keep their teams status updated but many don’t and in a big company with majority hybrid workers this will be a useful feature and I look forward to it being enabled since im always in office.
Your comment is wild I have to ask what you think you’re fighting here? How does updating a teams status to display if you’re working in the office or at home over step boundaries and open the floodgates for big scary control schemes? If its a company device this changes nothing, if they want to track your location they wont be using this teams feature. if they want to micromanage you or spy on you they wont be using this teams feature.
You just have no idea and are lashing out at things you dont understand. You havent even read the article. There is no privacy issue here its not Microsoft tracking any more than they already do and its not employer tracking.
i’ve worked in multiple organisations of over 100 000 employees with majority hybrid workers and this has never come up. can you explain what positives this information will give you?
To see if someone’s in office. Example you book a meeting and you check the event in outlook and it shows that everyone’s in office today so you can grab a meeting room and do it in person.
Someone raises a ticket for an issue thats easy to solve manually and you see theyre in tbe office so you go fix it.
Someone is looking for your coworker and you check teams and see hes working over at site B
How can you not see what positive info this would give? Have you never asked someone if they are in the office today, I would find that pretty hard to believe.
no i haven’t, because i have access to an asynchronous communication medium with which i can get the information i need from people in text form. when working in international teams every meeting is online anyway and tickets are usually resolved by either development or fixes to the online system. someone needing onsite help would constitute an emergency.
the only info i need from status lines is whether someone is on vacation or not.
If only you had access to a piece of communications software with which you could ask your coworkers if they’re in the office or not, and when they’re likely to be.
No one cares enough to update them thats the point but its still useful to be able to check at a glance if someone is wfh or not. I’m sorry this is such a challenging concept to you to grasp.
the part that is challenging to me is why anyone expects that to actually work?
have you been paying attention for the last 20+ years now?
i want to say there was maybe a period of 5 years around mid 2000 where it did but microslop has been awful for decades
and i can count on 2 hands the number of times the issue was urgent enough to need an immediate response regardless of what middle management thinks (and phone calls worked fine)
so over working for bigcap company cultures and middle managers having too little actual work
Why? Work from home, not work from home, the works the same. I can’t understand how this changes how you work. Unless your employer is very bad at figuring out how to do it. That is the only conclusion one can come to.
Your work does a poor job, so you rely on outdated work methods. There is no other way to look at this.
Because working from home doesn’t really mean you have to be in your house as long as you’re working. Just like you don’t have to actually eat on your lunch break. If you can’t trust me then why am I still working for you?
Ignoring that this wont update your status to “In a coffee shop” for argument sake lets pretend it does.
If your work allows you to work from a coffee shop and your status reflects that then whats the issue? If you aren’t allowed then why are you working from a coffee shop. This doesnt make sense as an argument. Plenty of people have in their contract strict policy for work from home. My job would not allow work to be done outside office, home or specific sites. We have people who are allowed to work in coffee shops and airports and they get laptops with privacy screens and are told to not access sensitive information in those locations.
The feature likely won’t work as well as you might think. What happens when you leave for 10 minutes to get some lunch, and that’s when your boss’s boss checks your location and it says you’re working from home or something. And now you get written up because you’re supposed to be in the office three days per week. I get this is a specific and convoluted example, but stuff like this happens–a feature is released, and management is too stubborn to take things with a grain of salt (or they otherwise won’t consider the limitations).
You’re assuming they’re only using your location data to update your in/out status. Neither MS nor your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more. And while it would be somewhat limited if it were only on work devices, understand that a lot of employers expect people to install this shit on their personal devices (I was the only holdout in my department who wouldn’t/couldn’t install MS authenticator on my phone, it was a whole thing).
I had a boss that would teams-call me when I was on the toilet. I don’t think it was malicious, just inconvenient. He was a dick about it though, so maybe he was watching my status.
The Authenticator app is one of the the least invasive pieces of software you could install on your phone, so you’re on your own there. But we just get a Yubikey and it’s their problem.
Leave your device? But really you’ll be able to say you were getting lunch and since you return 10mins later they’ll see you’re in the office. If they dont accept that then you’d be cooked with or without this feature.
Saying neither MS or your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more is a stupid point considering that both parties already have access to more information than this feature will provide. If they are bringing a personal device its probably already registered into some MDM software for basic device management of company assets and that provides them with more control than this will. If they dont then the company is probably to small and not interested in gathering this info or doing anything with it.
You do realise talking face to face is objectively better than talking over zoom or text right? I dont know why you keep acting this stupid all over the thread.
Oh yes all the 0 reasons you mentioned. How could I forget such a convincing argument.
I’m thinking that you may have a social disability and be misunderstanding. This is not for every worker. If you work better communicating over text thats fine your business can accommodate you. But majority of humans communicate best face to face instead of over text or calls. Its not to say you can’t effectively communicate over those mediums.
What you are suggesting doesn’t scale. It doesn’t work well for large orgnizations. It also hinders smaller ones because they never learn the skills to do it more effectively.
It is a learned practice. It does take effort but the rewards are many.
Yes I talk about this as so what of an authority. I have written on this subject, measured outcomes, created manuals and guides and trained people.
If you want good talent it isn’t all going to be in one place and we have the technology and tools to work with people anywhere and with some guidelines and rules: anytime. That is a huge win.
Works fine in multinationals that I’ve worked for. Are you telling me that if you’ve got 3 people sitting in the same office and you start a teams call instead of just saying lets grab a meeting room and chat about this? You’re cooked bro I would love to read your shitty book and see your measured outcome.
Im not a manager but im just struggling to see how you habe such a narrow view of work that you think its that linear. Most roles do require inter team and department cooperation and in those cases it’s nice to be able to check teams and see if someone’s in the office because then you can go talk to them directly.
Why is knowing if someone is wfh or in office such a bad thing to you? Also where someone is is not irrelevant there are plenty of restrictions around work locations.
Yo, I was hoping to chat about fizzing buzzes today. You in the office; wanna grab coffee? If you prefer you can call or we can just chat on slack? Anyway I thought it would be best if we foo’d the bars in that order on project A.
Easy. No naked ping. No pressure. Question already in the open. No expectations. Will find out if able to meet in person. Will get an initial response.
No shit that is what is already done every day. Its not meaningfully different from this change other than being slower. You give up nothing by the way there is no privacy argument to be had you’re using Microsoft teams in a work environment.
Why do we have a little dot next to the users name that way people can see if they’re online, offline, away or busy? You can just message them and ask.
Because you don’t message them generally if they’re away; so away and busy marking helps. The difference you’re describing for not needing to check if somebody is in the office, means you are the sort of person to just show up at somebody’s desk and yap. If not, this new feature gains you no ground, as you’d still need to check if they’re available. If so, you’re already quite unlikable in the workplace.
Its funny seeing the responses on this website where everyone is twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify why its useless or so bad it shouldnt be implemented and elsewhere the response is cool that sounds useful
I dont know what to tell you, people talk in offices, I’m sorry thats so upsetting to you. Human beings like to talk for work and for social reasons. You can disable the feature and cry when someone vists your cubicle but you can’t deny it will be useful.
For some people maybe this is true but for most it isnt. There are more people where this approach is useful vs not. The feature makes sense and is useful.
There it is. I was right. “Talk to them directly”. That demonstrates a huge problem in your work environment.
This is how side decisions get made. This is how things skip getting written down. This is how you break protocols, and risk other people wasting time to do some properly because you just took it up with someone. It kills asymmetric work. It make growth difficult as your office expands to other countries and offices. Documentation gets worse, responsibilities get worse.
No not really it doesnt necessarily lead to any of that. Communication is human to human in many businesses around the world and it will be that way for many more years. Asking if someone is working from home and waiting for a reply is a pointless waste of time. This will be a welcome change for everyone except developers.
I think the biggest issue I have with this is the framing. For 99% of workers, your company is exploiting you by making waaaaay more money from your work than they pay you in wages. Employees aren’t “lucky enough” to work from home. Capitalists are lucky we work for them. Additional erosion of privacy is not ok. This is a thinly veiled effort from companies to control workers more so they can be exploited harder. That’s it.
Yeah, when you connect to the VM it still needs to know where to send packets to, your source IP is still available.
Unless you’re running a personal vpn before your corporate traffic.
Agreed. It’s updating your status to in-office and updating your office room location.
Many hybrid workforces already have software that’s doing this as part of desk hoteling.
If you’re online and not in the office, it’s not updating your location to your home address.
This is useful for coworkers to figure out where they are at so they can sit close. It might not sound like a useful feature at first but consider how large a campus like Microsoft is. Knowing what building and floor someone is at makes it much easier to work together.
Some of the other responses here make it sound like they’ve never signed in with a badge before.
This is useful for coworkers to figure out where they are at so they can sit close. It might not sound like a useful feature at first but consider how large a campus like Microsoft is. Knowing what building and floor someone is at makes it much easier to work together.
Just imagine what we could achieve if we could somehow communicate with eachothers verbally!
Controversial opinion but this is perfectly fine to enable in an enterprise environment. If you’re being paid to work and you’re lucky enough to be trusted to work from home its fine to force employees to have location services enabled. Not like there isnt a million other ways to see where they are.
i’m fine with company property having tracking, but as long as i’m doing my job i don’t see why my employer needs to know were i am. and that’s despite me preferring to work on location.
I work in a big office, I want to know if the person is in office, working from home or offsite somewhere. This feature will automatically update the status to give that info. I dont see how its hard to understand why that is a useful feature. Also I said enterprise environment its assumed these are company devices.
I have never once had an issue with this.
Know why? Because I work with responsible adults. Once you start treating adults like little kids with no agency, you’re opening the floodgates for the control schemes which finally start to affect you personally.
What could your employer do that would overstep your personal boundaries? By handwaving this one away, you’re enabling them to cross your line later. You must see that, yes? It’s clear to everyone else.
You are not doing yourself any service, even if you think you’re just “sitting this one out.”
its a power issue by the ceo, MANAGMENT.
Im glad that people in your office are responsible enough to keep their teams status updated but many don’t and in a big company with majority hybrid workers this will be a useful feature and I look forward to it being enabled since im always in office.
Your comment is wild I have to ask what you think you’re fighting here? How does updating a teams status to display if you’re working in the office or at home over step boundaries and open the floodgates for big scary control schemes? If its a company device this changes nothing, if they want to track your location they wont be using this teams feature. if they want to micromanage you or spy on you they wont be using this teams feature.
If you can’t see it, it’s either willful ignorance or a chasm too wide for me.
Best of luck, you’re going to need it
You just have no idea and are lashing out at things you dont understand. You havent even read the article. There is no privacy issue here its not Microsoft tracking any more than they already do and its not employer tracking.
i’ve worked in multiple organisations of over 100 000 employees with majority hybrid workers and this has never come up. can you explain what positives this information will give you?
To see if someone’s in office. Example you book a meeting and you check the event in outlook and it shows that everyone’s in office today so you can grab a meeting room and do it in person.
Someone raises a ticket for an issue thats easy to solve manually and you see theyre in tbe office so you go fix it.
Someone is looking for your coworker and you check teams and see hes working over at site B
How can you not see what positive info this would give? Have you never asked someone if they are in the office today, I would find that pretty hard to believe.
no i haven’t, because i have access to an asynchronous communication medium with which i can get the information i need from people in text form. when working in international teams every meeting is online anyway and tickets are usually resolved by either development or fixes to the online system. someone needing onsite help would constitute an emergency.
the only info i need from status lines is whether someone is on vacation or not.
So basically your team works very, very poorly.
No?
If only you had access to a piece of communications software with which you could ask your coworkers if they’re in the office or not, and when they’re likely to be.
Maybe MS could make one of those that worked.
Are you trying to say that messaging a co worker to see if theyre in the office is quicker than checking their status?
You’re welcome to continue doing that but that sounds awful and I doubt you’ll do it once this rollsout.
what moron cares about updated teams statuses? that sounds like such a painful office environment
No one cares enough to update them thats the point but its still useful to be able to check at a glance if someone is wfh or not. I’m sorry this is such a challenging concept to you to grasp.
the part that is challenging to me is why anyone expects that to actually work?
have you been paying attention for the last 20+ years now?
i want to say there was maybe a period of 5 years around mid 2000 where it did but microslop has been awful for decades
and i can count on 2 hands the number of times the issue was urgent enough to need an immediate response regardless of what middle management thinks (and phone calls worked fine)
so over working for bigcap company cultures and middle managers having too little actual work
By that logic dont bother implementing anything because what if it doesnt work.
It’ll work good enough for most and better than the current status situation.
Why? Work from home, not work from home, the works the same. I can’t understand how this changes how you work. Unless your employer is very bad at figuring out how to do it. That is the only conclusion one can come to.
Your work does a poor job, so you rely on outdated work methods. There is no other way to look at this.
If they’re in the office we can talk face to face if theyre at home we teams call. You are actually beyond cooked if you’re unable to understand this.
If your job is as simple as receive instruction return output then I see how this doesnt change much but thats not every job.
If you don’t talk to people why even have an office? This change isnt for fully remote workplaces.
Because working from home doesn’t really mean you have to be in your house as long as you’re working. Just like you don’t have to actually eat on your lunch break. If you can’t trust me then why am I still working for you?
Ignoring that this wont update your status to “In a coffee shop” for argument sake lets pretend it does.
If your work allows you to work from a coffee shop and your status reflects that then whats the issue? If you aren’t allowed then why are you working from a coffee shop. This doesnt make sense as an argument. Plenty of people have in their contract strict policy for work from home. My job would not allow work to be done outside office, home or specific sites. We have people who are allowed to work in coffee shops and airports and they get laptops with privacy screens and are told to not access sensitive information in those locations.
Two reasons:
The feature likely won’t work as well as you might think. What happens when you leave for 10 minutes to get some lunch, and that’s when your boss’s boss checks your location and it says you’re working from home or something. And now you get written up because you’re supposed to be in the office three days per week. I get this is a specific and convoluted example, but stuff like this happens–a feature is released, and management is too stubborn to take things with a grain of salt (or they otherwise won’t consider the limitations).
You’re assuming they’re only using your location data to update your in/out status. Neither MS nor your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more. And while it would be somewhat limited if it were only on work devices, understand that a lot of employers expect people to install this shit on their personal devices (I was the only holdout in my department who wouldn’t/couldn’t install MS authenticator on my phone, it was a whole thing).
I had a boss that would teams-call me when I was on the toilet. I don’t think it was malicious, just inconvenient. He was a dick about it though, so maybe he was watching my status.
The Authenticator app is one of the the least invasive pieces of software you could install on your phone, so you’re on your own there. But we just get a Yubikey and it’s their problem.
Leave your device? But really you’ll be able to say you were getting lunch and since you return 10mins later they’ll see you’re in the office. If they dont accept that then you’d be cooked with or without this feature.
Saying neither MS or your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more is a stupid point considering that both parties already have access to more information than this feature will provide. If they are bringing a personal device its probably already registered into some MDM software for basic device management of company assets and that provides them with more control than this will. If they dont then the company is probably to small and not interested in gathering this info or doing anything with it.
Then ask
I do and its an inferior way of checking their status
Why do you want to know that? Haven’t figured out how to work asymmetrically or put things into writing?
You do realise talking face to face is objectively better than talking over zoom or text right? I dont know why you keep acting this stupid all over the thread.
No. It objectively is not. It may seem like it, but for all the reasons I have mentioned it absolutely is not.
Its poor training and lack of ability to function in this space that makes you think so.
Oh yes all the 0 reasons you mentioned. How could I forget such a convincing argument.
I’m thinking that you may have a social disability and be misunderstanding. This is not for every worker. If you work better communicating over text thats fine your business can accommodate you. But majority of humans communicate best face to face instead of over text or calls. Its not to say you can’t effectively communicate over those mediums.
I mentioned the reasons before.
What you are suggesting doesn’t scale. It doesn’t work well for large orgnizations. It also hinders smaller ones because they never learn the skills to do it more effectively.
It is a learned practice. It does take effort but the rewards are many.
Yes I talk about this as so what of an authority. I have written on this subject, measured outcomes, created manuals and guides and trained people.
If you want good talent it isn’t all going to be in one place and we have the technology and tools to work with people anywhere and with some guidelines and rules: anytime. That is a huge win.
Works fine in multinationals that I’ve worked for. Are you telling me that if you’ve got 3 people sitting in the same office and you start a teams call instead of just saying lets grab a meeting room and chat about this? You’re cooked bro I would love to read your shitty book and see your measured outcome.
“Hey, are you in-office today?”
Been asked several times as a newer employee on a hybrid schedule.
Also gives them a polite heads-up to expect a visitor.
It’s irrevelant where somebody is, as long as the assigned work is completed. Are you an insecure middle manager by chance?
Im not a manager but im just struggling to see how you habe such a narrow view of work that you think its that linear. Most roles do require inter team and department cooperation and in those cases it’s nice to be able to check teams and see if someone’s in the office because then you can go talk to them directly.
Why is knowing if someone is wfh or in office such a bad thing to you? Also where someone is is not irrelevant there are plenty of restrictions around work locations.
Easy. No naked ping. No pressure. Question already in the open. No expectations. Will find out if able to meet in person. Will get an initial response.
No shit that is what is already done every day. Its not meaningfully different from this change other than being slower. You give up nothing by the way there is no privacy argument to be had you’re using Microsoft teams in a work environment.
Why do we have a little dot next to the users name that way people can see if they’re online, offline, away or busy? You can just message them and ask.
Because you don’t message them generally if they’re away; so away and busy marking helps. The difference you’re describing for not needing to check if somebody is in the office, means you are the sort of person to just show up at somebody’s desk and yap. If not, this new feature gains you no ground, as you’d still need to check if they’re available. If so, you’re already quite unlikable in the workplace.
Its funny seeing the responses on this website where everyone is twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify why its useless or so bad it shouldnt be implemented and elsewhere the response is cool that sounds useful
I dont know what to tell you, people talk in offices, I’m sorry thats so upsetting to you. Human beings like to talk for work and for social reasons. You can disable the feature and cry when someone vists your cubicle but you can’t deny it will be useful.
I can deny it will be useful to me. And I can do so without any disparaging comments. I am glad it will be useful for you.
The fuck you do. You send them a message asking if they’re in the office, and if you can come distract them for a minute about NNN.
Don’t be the asshole who breaks people’s concentration because your question is more important for you than their work
For some people maybe this is true but for most it isnt. There are more people where this approach is useful vs not. The feature makes sense and is useful.
There it is. I was right. “Talk to them directly”. That demonstrates a huge problem in your work environment.
This is how side decisions get made. This is how things skip getting written down. This is how you break protocols, and risk other people wasting time to do some properly because you just took it up with someone. It kills asymmetric work. It make growth difficult as your office expands to other countries and offices. Documentation gets worse, responsibilities get worse.
This is what ruins work from home.
No not really it doesnt necessarily lead to any of that. Communication is human to human in many businesses around the world and it will be that way for many more years. Asking if someone is working from home and waiting for a reply is a pointless waste of time. This will be a welcome change for everyone except developers.
Yes it is a waste of time to ask if someone is working from home.
Because it shouldn’t matter.
If you have to ask that question, your company is doing work from home wrong.
I think the biggest issue I have with this is the framing. For 99% of workers, your company is exploiting you by making waaaaay more money from your work than they pay you in wages. Employees aren’t “lucky enough” to work from home. Capitalists are lucky we work for them. Additional erosion of privacy is not ok. This is a thinly veiled effort from companies to control workers more so they can be exploited harder. That’s it.
Why does anyone need to know where I am? Makes zero sense. And luck has nothing to do with working from home.
Also, I remote into work. There are no work owned devices at the places I choose to work from.
So the only locations they have are Azure, or the data center that houses a desktop environment depending on where I am remoting into.
This is a stupid useless feature that if you work remotely correctly only introduces more problems.
Cute that you think they dont get your location from your connection to the VM
What VM? Or Which VM I should say I guess.
You are saying the VM on the WVD would report my IP location I am connecting from?
Yeah, when you connect to the VM it still needs to know where to send packets to, your source IP is still available. Unless you’re running a personal vpn before your corporate traffic.
No one needs to know where you are. You aren’t the only person in the world. Different people different usecase.
Agreed. It’s updating your status to in-office and updating your office room location.
Many hybrid workforces already have software that’s doing this as part of desk hoteling.
If you’re online and not in the office, it’s not updating your location to your home address.
This is useful for coworkers to figure out where they are at so they can sit close. It might not sound like a useful feature at first but consider how large a campus like Microsoft is. Knowing what building and floor someone is at makes it much easier to work together.
Some of the other responses here make it sound like they’ve never signed in with a badge before.
Just imagine what we could achieve if we could somehow communicate with eachothers verbally!
Agree as well. Some of the hostile responses here are so insane I have wonder if they’ve even worked anywhere at all.
There’s so much to hate about Teams and Microsoft. Them trying to make the work status feature not completely useless isn’t it.