People working from home and using MS Teams - status changes to 'Away' very quickly...

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Caporegime
Joined
13 May 2003
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Location
Warwickshire
I found it annoying that recent Teams updates result in it changing my status to away very quickly (after ten minutes at a guess) when I'm at my desk but on the phone, or staring at a PowerPoint slide, which is a lot. This means that people won't message me and may think I'm not working.

It seems that if you log into your Office 365 account in a browser (I'm using Edge to keep Chrome for non work) and make sure you have a PowerPoint presentation open in full screen presentation mode on your work laptop to prevent it locking, you can then set your status as you wish in the browser and it will maintain this status, rather than it changing itself to away in about the amount of time it takes to make a brew and have a poo.

Quite niche I grant you, as it relies on you a) working from home b) caring enough c) using and being able to log into Teams online with your corporate account d) having a separate corporate laptop, etc.

Obviously not to be used for pretending that you're working when you're not, to hoodwink your line manager ;).
 
In my experience that little dot means absolutely nothing. I can be out of office, busy, in a meeting, whatever - people still contact me.

I strongly suspect that any manager using that dot to gauge whether you're being productive or not is an idiot or a crap manager.
 
Diddums said:
In my experience that little dot means absolutely nothing. I can be out of office, busy, in a meeting, whatever - people still contact me.

I strongly suspect that any manager using that dot to gauge whether you're being productive or not is an idiot or a crap manager.
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I still message people when their status is 'Offline'. If I don't get a response in 30 mins that's a written warning.
 
Diddums said:
In my experience that little dot means absolutely nothing. I can be out of office, busy, in a meeting, whatever - people still contact me.
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I get this a lot too with our internal chat system (not teams). My London location is clearly in my profile but I frequently login in the morning to find someone from the other side of the world frantically pinging me overnight repeatedly asking if I'm there because it's urgent, then escalating to senior management when I don't respond at 2am :D
 
Arsonist said:
I still message people when their status is 'Offline'. If I don't get a response in 30 mins that's a written warning.
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Wow, what a lovely person you must be to work for. Personally I'd ask for justification as to why it's offline first. You know, like someone who actually has an interest in their staff.

Are you Mike Ashley by any chance?
 
Arsonist said:
I still message people when their status is 'Offline'. If I don't get a response in 30 mins that's a written warning.
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Lol f'real?

People should just have the Teams app on their phone if they're AWOL, then they can simply message you back on that :cool:.

Diddums said:
Wow, what a lovely person you must be to work for. Personally I'd ask for justification as to why it's offline first. You know, like someone who actually has an interest in their staff.

Are you Mike Ashley by any chance?
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That's a little naive to assume the process is his choice! He's presumably got to fall in line if he wants to put food on the table.

Or he is a 'bad boss'.
 
Arsonist said:
I still message people when their status is 'Offline'. If I don't get a response in 30 mins that's a written warning.
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Some context? What does your company do? Is there a specific reason why people must be on-hand so urgently throughout the working day? If not, your management style belongs in the 1970s. Companies these days tend to treat their employees like, you know, actual people.

EDIT: Oh. lolz.
 
Diddums said:
Wow, what a lovely person you must be to work for. Personally I'd ask for justification as to why it's offline first. You know, like someone who actually has an interest in their staff.

Are you Mike Ashley by any chance?
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:D I was joking. Like I have the power to do written warnings!

But I do message people when they're offline so they have it when they're next back on. Likewise I don't mind if people message me while I'm away so I've got whatever info it is when I'm back. We all work such sporadic days and hours it's the best way of keeping different projects spinning that span multiple people/teams. And means my average day stays varied too.
 
m@rty said:
You poor man, did you have some type of accident?
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Ha, no.
I had some wrist pain a few weeks ago. So I'm on a ball now. I dunno what helped but its gone now.

Kind of like the ball stroking. Gotten used to it quickly.
Sometimes my ball gets greasy, I pop it out, and a quick wipe solves it.
 
We don't have MS teams at the minute so we use zoom. It has an option to set the status to away if you're idle for X amount of time but I don't have that ticked so I'm always showing as Available. But even if someone is set as away we will send each other a message for them to pick up when they're back :)

I do have my zoom set though so that from 5.30pm to 9am my status changes to do not disturb :D
 
We use Webex teams and I have availability set to off, downside is I can't see anyone else's availability either. Not sure how I've got away with it so long, last place I worked I made a script that input a space every 30 seconds and kept my Skype status available..

Not sure why people care about status so much, can easily be on the phone on a different remote desktop for a couple of hours without answering anyone etc. Still working probably harder than if just sitting looking through email etc.
 
Arsonist said:
:D I was joking. Like I have the power to do written warnings!

But I do message people when they're offline so they have it when they're next back on. Likewise I don't mind if people message me while I'm away so I've got whatever info it is when I'm back. We all work such sporadic days and hours it's the best way of keeping different projects spinning that span multiple people/teams. And means my average day stays varied too.
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Oh alright then, fair enough :D

I've gotta ask though, is the IT world full of skivers or something? The vast majority of the folks on this forum are in IT and some of the stories I read are... interesting.
 
We have Teams and I have the app on my work phone. Didn't think Teams actually set your status to Away automatically? Cisco Jabber used to but Teams never seems to for me...

How does it work if you are answering messages on your phone but your status is set to Away? Just curious..
 
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