this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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Controversial opinion but this is perfectly fine to enable in an enterprise environment. If you're being paid to work and you're lucky enough to be trusted to work from home its fine to force employees to have location services enabled. Not like there isnt a million other ways to see where they are.
It's irrevelant where somebody is, as long as the assigned work is completed. Are you an insecure middle manager by chance?
Im not a manager but im just struggling to see how you habe such a narrow view of work that you think its that linear. Most roles do require inter team and department cooperation and in those cases it's nice to be able to check teams and see if someone's in the office because then you can go talk to them directly.
Why is knowing if someone is wfh or in office such a bad thing to you? Also where someone is is not irrelevant there are plenty of restrictions around work locations.
Easy. No naked ping. No pressure. Question already in the open. No expectations. Will find out if able to meet in person. Will get an initial response.
i'm fine with company property having tracking, but as long as i'm doing my job i don't see why my employer needs to know were i am. and that's despite me preferring to work on location.
I work in a big office, I want to know if the person is in office, working from home or offsite somewhere. This feature will automatically update the status to give that info. I dont see how its hard to understand why that is a useful feature. Also I said enterprise environment its assumed these are company devices.
I have never once had an issue with this.
Know why? Because I work with responsible adults. Once you start treating adults like little kids with no agency, you’re opening the floodgates for the control schemes which finally start to affect you personally.
What could your employer do that would overstep your personal boundaries? By handwaving this one away, you’re enabling them to cross your line later. You must see that, yes? It’s clear to everyone else.
You are not doing yourself any service, even if you think you’re just “sitting this one out.”
Im glad that people in your office are responsible enough to keep their teams status updated but many don't and in a big company with majority hybrid workers this will be a useful feature and I look forward to it being enabled since im always in office.
Your comment is wild I have to ask what you think you're fighting here? How does updating a teams status to display if you're working in the office or at home over step boundaries and open the floodgates for big scary control schemes? If its a company device this changes nothing, if they want to track your location they wont be using this teams feature. if they want to micromanage you or spy on you they wont be using this teams feature.
what moron cares about updated teams statuses? that sounds like such a painful office environment
i've worked in multiple organisations of over 100 000 employees with majority hybrid workers and this has never come up. can you explain what positives this information will give you?
If you can’t see it, it’s either willful ignorance or a chasm too wide for me.
Best of luck, you’re going to need it
Because working from home doesn't really mean you have to be in your house as long as you're working. Just like you don't have to actually eat on your lunch break. If you can't trust me then why am I still working for you?
Ignoring that this wont update your status to "In a coffee shop" for argument sake lets pretend it does.
If your work allows you to work from a coffee shop and your status reflects that then whats the issue? If you aren't allowed then why are you working from a coffee shop. This doesnt make sense as an argument. Plenty of people have in their contract strict policy for work from home. My job would not allow work to be done outside office, home or specific sites. We have people who are allowed to work in coffee shops and airports and they get laptops with privacy screens and are told to not access sensitive information in those locations.
Then ask
I do and its an inferior way of checking their status
Two reasons:
The feature likely won't work as well as you might think. What happens when you leave for 10 minutes to get some lunch, and that's when your boss's boss checks your location and it says you're working from home or something. And now you get written up because you're supposed to be in the office three days per week. I get this is a specific and convoluted example, but stuff like this happens--a feature is released, and management is too stubborn to take things with a grain of salt (or they otherwise won't consider the limitations).
You're assuming they're only using your location data to update your in/out status. Neither MS nor your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more. And while it would be somewhat limited if it were only on work devices, understand that a lot of employers expect people to install this shit on their personal devices (I was the only holdout in my department who wouldn't/couldn't install MS authenticator on my phone, it was a whole thing).
I had a boss that would teams-call me when I was on the toilet. I don’t think it was malicious, just inconvenient. He was a dick about it though, so maybe he was watching my status.
The Authenticator app is one of the the least invasive pieces of software you could install on your phone, so you’re on your own there. But we just get a Yubikey and it’s their problem.
Leave your device? But really you'll be able to say you were getting lunch and since you return 10mins later they'll see you're in the office. If they dont accept that then you'd be cooked with or without this feature.
Saying neither MS or your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more is a stupid point considering that both parties already have access to more information than this feature will provide. If they are bringing a personal device its probably already registered into some MDM software for basic device management of company assets and that provides them with more control than this will. If they dont then the company is probably to small and not interested in gathering this info or doing anything with it.
Agreed. It’s updating your status to in-office and updating your office room location.
Many hybrid workforces already have software that’s doing this as part of desk hoteling.
If you’re online and not in the office, it’s not updating your location to your home address.
This is useful for coworkers to figure out where they are at so they can sit close. It might not sound like a useful feature at first but consider how large a campus like Microsoft is. Knowing what building and floor someone is at makes it much easier to work together.
Some of the other responses here make it sound like they’ve never signed in with a badge before.