A simple Microsoft 365 Roadmap update will now generate a raft of unhappy headlines. The idea is simple. “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.”
Forget the locational anonymity of a Teams virtual background. Teams will update your location when connected to your company’s WiFi. On video, you may have your usual background complete with company logo. But your boss will know you’re not in work.
Glad I work at a place that wouldn’t give a fuck as long as I’m getting shit done. This sort of bullshit undermines how people feel about work and likely harms productivity more than it helps (as is tradition with micromanaging people instead of setting them up for success and giving them the space they need to do their job).
Also, people who actually are slacking will find so many ways around this anyhow that it won’t actually matter to them because they already don’t care and are probably smart enough to get around it.
In a lot of ways, I have the opposite of micromanagement, they really don’t care what the hell I am doing as long as I’m delivering my projects effectively.
Sounds like you work at a place that trusts you to do the job you were hired to do.
My take is: If they don’t trust me, wtf am I even doing at a such a fucked up place? Then find a better place to work.
The sad thing is that some orgs that start off with healthy environments can slowly erode into really toxic environments and it’s like a frog boiling in water.
Sometimes it can happen very quickly - all it takes is one person of enough prominence being replaced with another, and something that took years to cultivate is shredded in weeks/months.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen both of these happen up close and personal. Sometimes it’s not always a viable option to try to pick up and move to another job…
Companies also get bought out by other companies and then change drastically overnight.
Yes, without question. That’s usually a fast-track to a highly toxic place, because often the people that they have acquired are viewed as just somehow being there accidentally, or worse, illegitimately, because the new management had no role in finding them, hiring them, and working to create/preserve a culture with them.
Also, many weak managers just want loyalists and that kind of personality just worries that they didn’t get to vet people so the people they have bought won’t be sufficiently loyal…
In my current job, I don’t mind doing a little overtime or working a weekend every now and than. They don’t care what I do, as long as it gets done. They don’t care that I go to the gym during office hours. I’m happy and I’m passionate about my work.
But if they started doing shit like this. I’d be working 9 to 5 and not giving a shit if work gets done or not. I’d become a drone and I’d be looking for other employment.
Fancy that? Don’t you love it when your work treat you like…wait for it… an Adult. Rewarded accordingly, help accountable accordingly. Who’d 've thought! 🤔
No kidding. What dystopian hell do people work in??
Are people just not going into the office without telling anyone? Like, who is this actually affecting?
Also, if they have to VPN into their company network, like assume many do, won’t that register as being in the office anyway?
I’d view it as more of the opposite: a tool built into the Teams suite to tattle on who isn’t complying with Return to Office policies.
VPNs would depend a bit on configuration. I know my ubiqiti router will let me dump VPN traffic into its own vlan (with dedicated IP range), so it would absolutely be possible to tell it apart from local traffic. At the same time, I’m pretty sure my workplace has all site network traffic VPN’d to the home office, so I’m not if the same logic would apply…
Trust me, if your employer wants to know if you’ve been coming into the office or not, they can easily find out without needing Microsoft Teams to tell them about it. They can see what IP address your machine is connecting from. And if you work in a building with secure access they could also just pull your badge-in history to find out if you’re actually there or not.
Oh, my employer already can and does track compliance via badge-ins, so they definitely know when they’re getting a return on investment from the corporate real estate.
I hadn’t thought about the connecting IP address though, that would absolutely be logged.
This does worry me a bit. We have an RTO policy. I report to a satellite office far away from corporate HQ which i transferred to after COVID, where I literally work with nobody in this actual building.
We are supposed to go in 2 days a week. I haven’t come to the office in over a year. And the only guy I knew in this office retired recently. I will be surprised if my desk hasn’t been cannibalized.
I guess I’m in a bit of a bind now. Lol! Shit. I don’t like this article.
Jokes on them! My company made everyone remote during COVID. It worked so well that they sold the corporate office buildings. We are all remote permanently! As long as I work my scheduled hours, they don’t care where in the world I am.
We JUST did this. I work in commercial real estate and we talked about it in 2018 but management chickened out. After the Pandemic, they forced us to go back for a year but moral fell to the lowest point ever and we couldn’t hire anyone.
Finally, it was time to decide on renewing our lease again and we switched back to remote. It’s been awesome and we’ve hired tons of people from our competitors who are pushing in office mandates.
I hope everyone keeps pushing their office to change. It’s possible.
Lucky bastard
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but why stop there? They should be paying you for getting work done to some agreed-upon standard, regardless of whether that takes 40 hours a week or far less.
I’ve gone through two companies that embraced Work From Home, a lot of companies saw no drop in productivity or results from having their employees comfortable and able to get to work on time.
One company didn’t go down without a fight, it took all the employees including myself, a manager, to speak up and talk to corporate and the CEO’s and say that my team and I oppose returning to the office, we don’t see a reason for it, and many of us will consider alternatives. They key point here is I backed it up with data, showing we only gained productivity and revenue since moving to WFH.
Despite all the hyped headlines out there about “Covid is over, time to go back to work!” we’ve seen for the last couple years, a lot of the changes it ushered in have become permanent. I know a lot of companies yanked the choke-chain around their employee’s necks, but not all.
The second company I moved to was already about 50% WFH, a much larger company too, and they made it totally optional, and they benefited a lot from being able to recruit talent from basically anywhere in the world.
Can I work at your workplace? Do they need an IT guy?
Hold on. Let me say this.
If your boss cares more about where you are doing your work, than if your work is getting completed, you need a new boss.
I work in IT support and I’ll say that this isn’t really anything that couldn’t be done before, is just more visible. Office 365 logs what device and app you’re using to connect, the IP address of the requester, what you were requesting from which service… The list is long. It’s a massive amount of data that largely, nobody cares about.
The only time I even look at that information is when some security software flags some action as suspicious, then, and only then, do I even bother.
If you go on vacation and suddenly connect from Florida when you are normally connecting from the UK, I get a notification. If you suddenly start using a well known VPN, I get a notification. The logic is for security. If you suddenly log in from a new place, then it’s more likely that the login in question wasn’t you, and you’ve been hijacked. That’s literally my only interest in your location. Most bosses don’t give a shit either.
I hope Teams announces when my CEO and other executives are not in the office. Just to level the field.
Hah, it will almost certainly have admin options that allow high level people to turn off that feature.
Lmao any corporate IT department can do this at any time anyways
Well, the IT stuff made a log of it, but I think teams is promising to actually rat on you. Like, if it detects it, it’ll send a notice to the boss that you’re being remote
It updates your location status to “in the office”
It also changes to “away” if you don’t move the mouse for long enough.
Anyone looking to these as workers not doing their job, is looking in the wrong place.
Well i guess i am lucky because my laptop remains on site and i connect to vdi and then rdp to my laptop. (When working from home) so the data will be meaningless. At least in my case.
That particular data is meaningless in all cases
Apparently some people pretend to be at the office when they’ve actually stayed at home
Teams is already such a bloated fucking mess of an application.
I’ve gone back and forth with my opinion on Teams, but now I agree with you. Earlier there was a lot of shit talk about it, and it just worked for me with no problems. After all of the additional bloat (now we have Copilot in it) it crashes all the time.
It never crashes for me - because I have to use the browser PWA app, because the native app doesn’t work on Linux that great.
On the other hand, the UX is absolutely terrible.
The native app for Linux is no longer supported anyway. PWA is the only official way now.
And yes the UX is terrible. Especially the search function, it always finds unrelated things and almost never what I’m looking for. Same thing with Outlook (the real outlook and the ‘new’ one), OneNote and Sharepoint.
It is my #1 and pretty much only usecase for copilot. I think copilot for office is not great but searching for my stuff it does do very well. Paying $30 a month to fix something that should have worked in the first place is a bit mad though.
You might just not be noticing the crashes because it likes to restart silently. I’ll only notice it because sometimes it happens when teams is active on my other monitor and it auddenly disappears. Might be auto update, or maybe even a “we know this app gets worse over time so let’s just restart it regularly as a solution”.
I am glad I work where nobody monitors teams because that would be stupid.
But exactly how will this work for the people who are actually using modern computing? So I am on Azure Virtual Desktop for one instance of teams, and another that I use for calls on a personal laptop, maybe on their wifi but always with a VPN because we habitually run vpns.
So where am I?
List of locations it compiles for you, based on a heuristic analysis of data, time of day, and cross-referenced by your consumer data would do it pretty nicely
As always it’s the worst product that got the most marketing that gets used by everyone.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Apparently it’s dirt cheap as compared to alternatives
I think it’s more the case it gets bundled in for free (or near enough) with other MS crap like Office.
Microsoft’s products are no longer usable.
Not safe, not sensible, not smart.
Teams is trash, electron is a miscarriage of an idea, and M$ is totally morally bankrupt.
Shocker.
Electron is amazing, for smaller teams, individuals or whatever BUT a trillion dollar company cutting corners on native apps, even for their own platform… come on
Meanwhile, they cannot or will not add useful features like…being able to have more than one fucking person share a screen. This is after YEARS of lockdown.
And don’t get me started on how basic their chat “feature” is. I mean…have they even bothered to look at Slack at all? And it’s not like Slack is the only one they might look at…how about Matrix/Riot?
Nope, it’s almost like they just know millions of users are stuck with their craptastic solution because it’s bundled into the rest of their stack and enterprises are going with it no matter how much it sucks balls.
Maybe I’m dating myself, but it still seems incredible to me that a relatively small update to the location features in one piece of software triggers news articles about the broader societal implications.
Software has too much power over our lives.
And it’s a terrible piece of software at that.
Maybe, but M$ has had quite an impact over office life for quite some time, and it seems like nearly every org is still paying the M$ tax, even after all these years. Teams is part of that stack, and while I don’t know anyone tech-savvy that actually likes it for anything it supposedly solves, it gets used anyway. It is terrible as an IM client. Only one user at a time can share a screen, so it’s terrible at any real collab, also. But it integrates with Outlook for scheduling meetings, so…
In addition, it seems like it is almost intentionally user-hostile when it comes to setting up prefs, like disabling incoming video as a default. This is a feature I’ve seen asked for over 5 years ago. When everyone was stuck at home and sometimes on rather slow/unreliable networks, Microsoft makes you disable incoming video on every single new Teams session, from all the geniuses that felt they were important enough to have their camera on all the time for no real reason.
Now you’d think they would have adapted to something like this, and turned this around very quickly at the beginning of Covid, as not only was it requested from users, but it would make a lot of sense (and maybe it lightens their servers load, too? Although I imagine video feeds don’t get streamed through their servers?) and probably be a decent workaround to having audio properly work on slow/bursty network connections, etc.
And yet…I still don’t see the feature as an option. I think I saw an answer about some setting that could be done globally or in a policy, as if that is really the answer. Again, it seems like it is software aimed at being sold to control freaks who also care nothing about the user experience of their captured user base. So, 5 years later, I get to disable incoming video on each call if some inconsiderate person has their video on.
Another feature no one asked for.
Oh, this was asked for, I assure you.
Not by workers, but it was asked for.
No. I’m sure managers asked for this…
You, the worker, are not Microsoft’s customer. You and your data are the product.
If you are not the customer, you are the product!
Eh, most companies that allow Work From Home are already tracking your login location and use their own robust VPN anyway that sends your login location to validate who you are. Teams is just trying to sell what most companies already do as a “new feature.”
I can’t really think of a way this is going to harm most users unless you’re already trying to scam your employer by vacationing without using your PTO and trying to show up to meetings from the hotel WiFi, or working two jobs. (Both of which I’ve had to deal with managing WFH teams.)
