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.
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!