What You Need To Know Before Using Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams: it was there during the pandemic to make working remotely and remote schooling convenient and easy! It was the hero the pandemic needed!

… or so, that’s how they try to present it.

Chances are, whether you’re employed or self-employed, if you’ve done any remote work, you’ll have had the unfortunate experience of using Microsoft Teams in some capacity.

I’ve warned so many people about this awful piece of spyware because I noticed many people do not know just how dangerous it can be use it. No, it’s not dangerous in the sense that it has viruses or whatever, but rather in the way that the companies you work for can use it against you.

That’s why I wanted to take the time to write this quick article detailing what everyone needs to know before using Microsoft Teams.

Your Organisation Owners Can Read Your Messages

We’ve been telling people about this one for years as it’s not a well-known concern that general employees and contractors have (but they should!). This isn’t some conspiracy theory, either. Organisation owners can see your chat history if they perform a content search, which is a tool available to them.

Whilst they might not use this tool, organisation owners, from my own experience working for a company that relied heavily on Microsoft Teams, can use other tools to be able to see your chat history. An example of this is something I experienced one day when the CTO of the last company I worked for referenced something I said in private. I said something in Russian on Teams and he directly referenced it not long after because he had a tool that alerted him whenever anyone used anything like profanity or foreign.

Bugs Galore

Your resident corpo is likely to make a confused face if they read this. “Bugs? Microsoft is perfect! The users are wrong and I’m a suit who thinks they know everything!”

Don’t listen to these clowns. This software is god awful at telling when someone is out of a meeting, many of the features stopped working suddenly whenever I used it, and there were days where it took multiple attempts to sign in because of an error on Microsoft’s end. It added so much time to my work day that I was started to wonder if my job was just working through the issues on Microsoft Teams.

The Profanity Filter

Thankfully, I’ve not personally experienced the joys of the profanity filter, but really, if the company you’re working for enabled this, that’s some next level nanny feature nonsense.

What’s next? A swear jar? Great, now we’re giving them ideas to take more money out of our wallets…

Activity Tracking

This one is really annoying and used by micromanagers who barely understand how to read data. Essentially, they can track your activity on Microsoft Teams based on how active you are. If you don’t type something over the 30 seconds or so, it sets your status to ‘away’. If you go ‘away’ enough, your resident micromanager will know this and contact you asking why you aren’t working. It doesn’t matter if maybe you keep Teams open on your laptop and work from your Desktop. These nuances are too complicated for a micromanager. No, you must just not be working at all, even if you have activity on the platform you’re working on. Morons.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hate Microsoft Teams. It is awful and I am so glad I don’t have to leave that garbage open on my computer anymore.

Alistair Kavalt
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