In this post, we discuss why and how we can use office messengers, specifically MS Teams, to monitor employees.
There are many tools available to monitor employee activity. We've heard of tools that monitor mouse movement and keystrokes and log anomalous behavior; CCTV cameras, of course, are widely used. But many times, especially in sophisticated companies, a company may want to maintain a façade of trust. In these cases, the omnipresent messenger can come to the rescue.
Messengers are installed by default on all office computers. They are also always on on most employees' laptops when they are working. If you work remotely and want to monitor your team, i.e., exert power over the team, you need exclusive access to something; in this case, it is the MS Teams API.
Once you have the access, MS Teams provides you with the rest. The MS Teams API comes with presence-collection functionality:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/presence-get?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http
Now, for each user, you could continuously collect the status and create a database. With some basic ML algorithms, you could find patterns in the collected data and detect anomalies. These anomalies can be correlated with what the employees are proclaiming on the messenger to gain further insights into their behavior and personalities.
This strategy has three advantages. The first is that you have an approximate idea of whether your employees are working or not, the second is that it can maintain the façade of trust, and the third is that many team members may not realize that they are being monitored.