Microsoft 365 Feature Could Allow Companies To Spy On Their Employees
By Monitoring what your employees do can have certain advantages and disadvantages, where if you’re finding that productivity isn’t as good as it should be, seeing what’s going on could help fix that. However, the disadvantage is that people in general don’t like being monitored as it is an invasion of privacy.
It turns out that if your company uses Microsoft 365, they could have been monitoring you all this time. This is because a report from The Guardian has revealed that one of the features of Microsoft 365 is the ability for companies to monitor and “spy” on their employees. Apparently this feature comes in the form of a “productivity score” in which management can monitor employees to see how “productive” they are.
However, researcher Wolfie Christl claims that this is a problem because it judges employees based on purely arbitrary metrics, versus the actual quality of their work. For example for some people, they might work fast and have more down time, which means that they look “unproductive”. Other people can take longer to work, but they do so because they want to ensure the best possible quality, both of which are traits that shouldn’t necessarily be penalized using such a system.
That being said, while the feature is present, it doesn’t necessarily mean that companies are using it to track and monitor the productivity of their employees, but the fact that it is there does seem to have raised some concerns.
