Microsoft has officially launched the new "Workplace Check-in" feature for the Teams app, which automatically updates an employee's work location via WiFi or connection to peripheral devices on the desk.

This feature is disabled by default and requires activation by the administrator and the employee's consent, but enabling it "voluntarily" is not as free a choice as it seems in the work environment.

93 out of the top 100 companies in the "Fortune 100" list use Teams, and the new "Workplace Check-in" tool is being introduced as a feature aimed at making employees' lives easier by automatically logging their arrival as soon as they get to work and connect to the company's WiFi, as an alternative to traditional attendance recording devices.

This feature also aims to reduce the need to manually update presence status and enable colleagues to know the possibility of scheduling in-person meetings with them, according to a report by technology news site "Engadget" reviewed by "Al Arabiya Business."

Despite Microsoft's attempt to present this update as a simple, optional feature that could be very useful for employees, there is a long list of concerns related to privacy, social surveillance, and the use of employee location data against them, at a time when return-to-office policies are putting increasing pressure on the workforce.

According to Microsoft's official documentation, this feature is an extension of the current presence status indicator on the platform, along with working hours controls within Microsoft 365.

The goal is not only to enable colleagues to know if a person is available, but also to know where they are working from.

If the IT team sets up the system properly, the status will not only show the employee as being in the office but will also specify the room or floor they are working from.

Privacy concerns

Microsoft has confirmed that this is not a surveillance tool, telling Fortune magazine that "protecting employee privacy is at the core of how we innovate and develop our products."

That may be true to some extent: administrators do not have a reporting dashboard, no historical location logs, and no way to query where anyone has been. Employees can also manually change or delete their location at any time, and the feature does not work outside working hours.

However, when someone is the only one in the team who refuses to enable this feature due to privacy concerns, a kind of imbalance arises. The idea of "voluntary" subscription to this feature on a personal level may suddenly turn into a feeling of pressure.

A survey by ExpressVPN found that 80% of employers monitor employees while working remotely. The American Psychological Association also notes that 56% of workers who are monitored by employers feel stressed or psychologically pressured while working.

Ironically, an analysis conducted by Microsoft itself on the effects of digital surveillance classified tracking a person's physical location and body movements as one of the most intrusive electronic performance monitoring methods in terms of privacy.

Microsoft has also required employees residing within 50 miles of one of the company's offices to work from the office at least three days a week. Introducing a feature that relies on WiFi to determine location on the same platform may not necessarily be linked to the return-to-office policy, but it is hard to ignore the impression it creates.

In this way, another new location tracking feature emerges that may threaten employee privacy, within an app used by more than one million organizations worldwide.

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