In a world of mouse jigglers and workplace surveillance, there’s a clear divide between employees who wish to be left alone to their work, and their bosses who want to maximize productivity. Unfortunately for the desk jockeys of the world, managers will soon have yet another tool to keep track of their staff.
Called Workplace Check-in, the new program is an extension of an already existing Microsoft Teams feature meant to facilitate room reservations. When the extension goes online, it will basically analyze a worker’s Wi-Fi connection in order to beam their location to their team, PC World reports, which inevitably includes their supervisor.
As Microsoft described it to PC World: “when users connect to their company’s Wi-Fi, Teams will soon be able to update their work location to show the building in which they are working.”
The company caveats that this is “disabled by default,” and that “end users,” or workers, will “always have the choice to allow or decline the sharing of this information.” Of course that may be true in a technical sense, but it doesn’t mean much when a manager can force their workers to turn the tracking feature on anyway under the threat of disciplinary action.
According to PC World, Microsoft plans on launching Workplace Check-in later in June, after consistent delays beginning in late 2025.
The announcement comes just days after Lan Ye, Microsoft’s president of the Teamwork Experiences Group hosted an “Ask Me Anything” panel on the Microsoft Teams subreddit. During the discussion, one critical commenter asked “why is Teams designed to tattle on employees at every turn from presence and location to activity?”
In response, Ye wrote back that “Microsoft Teams does not track employees’ movements or attendance” — another carefully worded half-truth.
“There is no automatic detection of work location,” Ye continued. “Microsoft Teams includes an optional feature that helps employees keep their office or remote status up to date so coworkers can coordinate in‑person work. It is not a monitoring or surveillance tool and does not track movement, attendance, or store historical location data.”
Again, the distinction is worth noting. It may be true that Microsoft itself is not tracking employee’s movements or attendance, but it’s nonetheless handing companies the tools to do it themselves. For workers sick of the ever-growing workplace panopticon, it’s surely a distinction without a difference.
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