A new “Workspace Check-in” feature was rolled out last month.
Microsoft’s new Workplace Check-in feature for Teams has officially rolled out, allowing an employee’s workplace to be automatically updated using Wi-Fi connections or desktop devices. It can be turned off by default, requiring administrator activation and employee consent, but “voluntary” opt-in isn’t as free a choice as it seems in the workplace.
Microsoft Teams is used by 93 of the Fortune 100 companies, and its new workplace check-in tool is being touted as a feature that’s supposed to make employees’ lives easier by automatically checking them in once they arrive at work and connect to company Wi-Fi, replacing physical recording devices. This is also supposed to reduce the need to manually update your status and let your colleagues know they can coordinate in-person meetings with you.
Even though Microsoft is trying to present this update as a simple, optional feature that can be very useful for employees, there is a laundry list of concerns about privacy, social surveillance, and the weaponization of presence in an era where return-to-office policies are stifling the workforce.
What is the Teams Workplace recording feature?
Workplace Check-in is a Teams feature designed to reduce the immeasurable effort of manually updating your work status. Rather than logging into Teams every morning and typing “in the office” or whatever you choose to entertain your colleagues, the feature automatically detects your location once you start using the company Wi-Fi network.
According to Microsoft’s official documentation, this feature is an extension of the platform’s existing online presence signal and Microsoft 365 working hour controls. The goal is to not only allow colleagues to see if someone is available, but also where they are working from. Because if the IT team sets things up correctly, your status will show not only that you’re in the office, but also what room or floor you’re on. Once your laptop connects to Conference room Cfor example, the whole office will know you are there.
Privacy, workplace surveillance and trust issues
Microsoft swears it’s not a monitoring tool and told it Fortune that “employee privacy is at the heart of how we innovate and build.” And that may be true to some extent, because admins don’t have a reporting dashboard, location history, and no way to ask where someone is. Employees can also manually replace or clear their location at any time and the feature does not work outside of working hours.
However, when you are the only one on the team to refuse this functionality for privacy reasons, there is an imbalance. The “voluntary” aspect of adopting this feature on a personal level suddenly feels like pressure.
An ExpressVPN survey found that 80% of employers engage in remote work monitoring. The American Psychological Association says that 56 percent of workers who experience surveillance by their employer feel tense or stressed at work. Ironically, even Microsoft’s analysis of the effects of digital surveillance ranks tracking a person’s physical location and body movements among the most invasive methods of electronic performance monitoring.
Microsoft itself has required employees living within 50 miles of a company office to work on-site at least three days a week. Deploying Wi-Fi-based location functionality on the same platform while enforcing a return-to-desk policy isn’t necessarily related, but it’s hard to ignore the optics.
So here we are: there’s yet another location tracking feature that threatens employee privacy, built into an app used by more than a million organizations around the world. The biggest question right now isn’t whether Microsoft created this feature with bad intentions; it’s a question of whether the companies deploying it will find ways to abuse it.
