The pandemic proved that a lot of us can do our jobs just fine out of the office. Nevertheless, companies continue to push for workers to return to their cubicles—whether in a hybrid arrangement, or five-days-a-week mandatory attendance. In both cases, many companies are looking for ways to hold employees accountable: Since many of our jobs can be done anywhere with an internet connection, if your boss doesn’t have eyes on you, it’s not always easy to tell where you’re working from.
Perhaps your company has rolled out initiatives meant to encourage office attendance. Maybe your boss counts your badge swipes, to ensure that you’re meeting your weekly in-office quota, or you are obligated to attend in-person meetings. But it’s not just the companies themselves that are working on these kinds of measures. Even Microsoft is trying to make it harder for remote employees to continue working from where they want to.
How Teams will track where you’re working from
As spotted by Tom’s Guide, Microsoft Teams will roll out an update in December that will have the option to report whether or not you’re working from your company’s office. The update notes are sparse on details, but include the following: “When users connect to their organization’s [wifi], Teams will soon be able to automatically update their work location to reflect the building they’re working from. This feature will be off by default. Tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in.”
The language suggests that Microsoft intends for this feature to be focused more on helping workers locate fellow employees in large office complexes, and less on snitching on employees working from home when they shouldn’t be. That’s fair enough: If I worked for a company with multiple buildings on campus, it’d be helpful to know where someone I needed to talk to happened to be working that day.
What do you think so far?
But let’s be real. This feature is also going to be used by companies to track their employees, and ensure that they’re working from where they’re supposed to be working from. Your boss can take a look at your Teams status at any time, and if it doesn’t report you’re working from one of the company’s buildings, they’ll know you’re not in the office. No, the feature won’t be on by default, but if your company wants to, your IT can switch it on, and require that you enable it on your end as well.
As someone who has worked remotely for most of my professional career, I find the return-to-office mandates generally silly. I understand there are jobs that cannot be done remotely, and aspects of others that are made better by in-person collaboration. But if the vast majority of your work is done on a laptop connected to the internet, it makes no sense for you to be forced to work from an office. It also seems demoralizing to treat employees like children, tracking their whereabouts to ensure they’re doing their jobs from a pre-approved location. If you’re getting your work done, who cares where that work is happening?
