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An Anonymous Coward has submitted the following:
A December update to Microsoft Teams that will be disabled by default will reportedly track user location and report it if the feature is enabled. This will allow bosses to tell if an employee is in the office or working from home and set their status accordingly. It will also be able to tell if the user is not at their normal home logon location and provide evidence to employers showing the user's location. Workers who have been taking mini holidays while claiming to be working from home may be affected by this new feature.
The idea of the new feature is to eliminate confusion for bosses about where a worker is within the building and to see if they are working remotely.
But those who work from home argue it is an invasion of privacy.
"Micro management at peak? All online work doesn't need you to be in the office, we can do it from home," one X user said.
"Why is this needed?" another added.
Almost half of Gen Z workers surveyed (44 per cent) revealed last year that they took a secret trip, with most giving their workplace the impression they were working normal hours and using a virtual background in meetings to trick their employer.
Ella Maree, 26, started hush-tripping after Covid when her corporate workplace adopted a 3:2 work week, which meant she could work from home on Mondays and Fridays.
"Since travel options were limited, hush trips became my go-to choice," she said.
"I flew out Thursday evening and worked by the hotel pool, restaurant and room on Friday. I maintained the same level of productivity as if I were physically in the office or working from home, so really, a win-win situation.
"Most of my office work from home Friday, so really, I'm just making the most of our remote work flexibility."
Ms Maree insisted her boss "wouldn't mind" given workplaces are mostly connected online and that she was always getting her work done.
How many Soylentils still have the ability to WFH, either full-time or part-time? I thought one of the attractions of WFH is the ability to work when the hours suit you and not the standard 9-5 (for non-Usians). Would you consider working from a different location a breach of your contract?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Monday October 27, @12:15PM (3 children)
Wouldn't care where the employee is located as long as the work is getting completed.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday October 27, @02:54PM (1 child)
I think it also depends on which states the company/employee has a physical presence [taxfoundation.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Monday October 27, @04:49PM
There can be issues related to things like licensing for things like medical training or mental health practices, but I think in those cases, it's more where the patient is rather than the professional.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday October 27, @06:49PM
Unfortunately, by definition most managers are mediocre, and about as many are bad as are good. And if a good manager reports to a bad manager, the good manager can only do so much to run interference to protect their own team from the bad manager. Indeed, the Peter Principle means that once you get into the VPs and above especially in larger org structures, the odds that somebody is in over their head and thus a poor manager in any given management chain approaches 100%.
And to make matters worse, a bad boss is usually extremely distrustful of everybody below them, because they know they're incompetent and thus any subordinate who appears to be too competent looks like a threat to be destroyed. One of the other impacts of that distrust is that the bad boss won't trust their subordinate managers' assessment of their own reports, and instead will want to substitute in "objective" metrics over the evaluation of skilled people. This becomes especially true once you get into levels of management that have subordinates whose job the boss does not know how to do, e.g. someone who was a fantastic head of marketing for a division gets promoted to run that division and all of a sudden has to manage the finance, tech, sales, operations, etc for that division. And while the new division head doesn't understand how any of those things work, they know that at least some of the people that do understand how those things work also wanted that same promotion and might stab them in the back.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin