A simple Microsoft 365 Roadmap update will now generate a raft of unhappy headlines. The idea is simple. “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.”
Forget the locational anonymity of a Teams virtual background. Teams will update your location when connected to your company’s WiFi. On video, you may have your usual background complete with company logo. But your boss will know you’re not in work.
Are people just not going into the office without telling anyone? Like, who is this actually affecting?
Also, if they have to VPN into their company network, like assume many do, won’t that register as being in the office anyway?
I’d view it as more of the opposite: a tool built into the Teams suite to tattle on who isn’t complying with Return to Office policies.
VPNs would depend a bit on configuration. I know my ubiqiti router will let me dump VPN traffic into its own vlan (with dedicated IP range), so it would absolutely be possible to tell it apart from local traffic. At the same time, I’m pretty sure my workplace has all site network traffic VPN’d to the home office, so I’m not if the same logic would apply…
Trust me, if your employer wants to know if you’ve been coming into the office or not, they can easily find out without needing Microsoft Teams to tell them about it. They can see what IP address your machine is connecting from. And if you work in a building with secure access they could also just pull your badge-in history to find out if you’re actually there or not.
Oh, my employer already can and does track compliance via badge-ins, so they definitely know when they’re getting a return on investment from the corporate real estate.
I hadn’t thought about the connecting IP address though, that would absolutely be logged.
If I’m plugged into the local switch, my IP address is a static 192.168.x.x. If I connect via WiFi, it’s dynamic 10.10.x.x. If I’m coming in via VPN, I’m crossing the external firewall, routed to a dedicated remote VLAN based on network permissions, and dynamically assigned 10.70.x.x.
A business doesn’t need Teams to tell them if you’re remote or not. This is just to wave a big public red flag and sow division.
I’m sure this “feature” is aimed at the tech-illiterate micromanagers, like the C-Suite, giving them a nice little icon, not at IT who can easily see this type of thing many different ways.
In my experience the illiterate micromanagers got the nerds to send them reports. Or set up a dashboard to give them a real-time view into how many local vs remote connections there were.
Our RTO mandate was December 2020.
But just think about how much easier it is to see the little icon right there in Teams.
I wish for a world where AI would be put to actual good use and vet such managers seeking such bullshit metrics and dashboard and icons like that, and inform the hiring manager(s) that this kind of thing is incredibly toxic and destroys effectiveness, morale and so on, and that unless such a manager could be retrained to drop such micromanagement nonsense, that the company should pass on hiring them…
What country? I didn’t realize companies were doing that so early.
I know our company started making some kind of noises about it - in fits and starts - but more along the lines of "when we are all coming back in, yadda yadda ", maybe starting in the fall of 2020, but then wave after wave kept happening, we started hiring people in other parts of the country nowhere near an office and people that were near an office started moving away to cheaper locations or places near their aging parents or near their own adult kids, and we started to hear it less and less…
USA.
Most of the tech teams spent their days working with people in offices across the country (and in Europe), so being physically in the office didn’t matter much unless there was a hardware install or something. Didn’t stop brass (headquartered in the Deep South) from doing their best to wag their dicks around (furloughs and pay cuts for those that remained were not enough, it seemed). Before another 12 months passed half the network team had left and there was constant churn on the sysadmin team. Didn’t matter. The company got bought by a bigger fish and the execs got golden parachutes despite nearly running the company into the ground. Meritocracy!
Bssids give away your location.