Employee monitoring using Microsoft Office

Question

I recently heard that some senior management at my company monitor employee "work habit" using some Microsoft Office's feature for all their departmentThere is indeed a Microsoft Office feature called "Viva", but it supposed to be private to us.https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/personal/overview/privacy-guide-usersViva emails are grossly inaccurate for me. It recalls 80% focus time when clearly I have been in meetings (sometimes unnecessary but beyond my control) and in-person collaboration all day for a week.I can't think what could be wrong! Sometimes I don't get time to accept my meetings; because I haven't figured out which one of my conflicts to pick. I still attend the one I feel is appropriate. Microsoft is someone unable to link attendance information from Teams?Is Viva using this to predict that I am not attending a meeting? If that is true, where is the accountability on Microsoft for having designed unverifiable and un-auditable monitoring methods that clearly could affect people's career? Do they assume I am working entirely inside office products? I can't imagine what happens to some poor soul who needs to keep their job. Microsoft says their tool is not meant for monitoring... like that is going to prevent folks from using it.Anyone with similar experience?

srvmshr · Accepted Answer

Engineers were instrumental towards the greatest changes over the past century - from jet aviation to nuclear bombs. We, as engineering brethren, learnt to simplify work, improve lifestyle, tried making resources more accessible & equitable, fostering a generally congenial culture of trust-based camaraderie. For every creative challenge there are multiple ideas for engineers. Flexibility and independence at workplace have a high correlation to work quality.
But we have sales, managers & marketing honchos as the necessary evil - the other side of the equation, the yan to the yin. They are masters of Excel sheets, conjurers of convincing graphs, and savants of dubious management theories. Except the rare few, most MBA-wielding junta try to over-optimize the very workforce earning them their source of bread & butter.
Viva is one such "optimization tool" which is encouraged during performance reviews. We have used it & we are happier without it. I feel sorry for the team who made it. The execution is clueless shortsighted and lacking imagination. It isn't designed for anyone who remotely uses something except O365, much less the more complex development ecosystem. Its reminders are labored, the focus indicators are hilarious & no one takes the estimated time distribution seriously. It is a software which should never have existed - but still does - a sad reminder of what badly conceived idea married to painful execution looks like

Kon-Peki · Answer

My daily Viva email is always asking me to let the meeting organizer know if I am going to attend some meeting that would have happened 7-10 days in the past if it hadn't been cancelled. It's always the same would-be meeting for a few days before it latches on to a new could-have-been meeting. 99% of my job involves doing things on non-Windows machines or VMs that are hosted in the cloud or some other data center, so I guess it doesn't have much material to go on for its surveillance.It's kind of frightening to think that people are being judged on such complete garbage, but I guess as long as it is uniformly garbage then nobody will get unfairly hammered for it.

speedgoose · Answer

I think your senior manager is bored and has nothing better to do. Maybe you could spend some time to make a few beautiful PowerBI dashboards, so they have a new activity to do at the office.

nittanymount · Answer

what is the standard for a better employee with this? join more meetings? more 'focus' time on MS products? :-)