Can Employers Monitor Teams Calls?

When you work for a company, you will have concerns about the privacy of your activities, whether the organization is large or small. Calls on Microsoft Teams are a large part of the average workday and how coworkers collaborate and interact with each other. Can employers monitor Teams calls?

Your employer can monitor Teams calls and other activity within the app unless they are private. The monitoring is usually done through a third-party monitoring app, like Wolfeye because Teams itself only tracks usage data of the services and apps within it and only shows basic analytics.

Employee monitoring helps develop solutions to increase productivity, despite concerns about privacy invasion. Read on to learn more about employee monitoring on Microsoft Teams and third-party apps like Wolfeye.

Is Employer Monitoring Of Teams Calls Possible?

It is, in fact, possible for your employer to monitor the calls you have on Teams. If you have all of your Teams meetings recorded within the app, anyone can review them at any time, including your supervisor, manager, and anyone else who has been granted access to view the meetings. Both in-office and remote employees can be monitored during work hours

Through built-in Microsoft Teams analytics, Teams administrators at your company can track all kinds of usage data for each person in their assigned Teams in the Admin Center. If you are included in your employer’s Teams call plan, they can view individual call history and length of calls.

They can also see each employee’s meetings and their duration and participants. This way, they ensure team members are staying on task and following their assigned schedules. If your employer uses monitoring, you as the employee cannot prevent it.

Employers can also monitor Teams calls through third-party monitoring software like Wolfeye. Wolfeye has many monitoring features that allow managers and supervisors to remotely watch the productivity and activity of their employees in real-time. However, this information is encrypted so that no one without access or outside the company can see it.

What Is The Purpose of Employee Monitoring?

Every wifi network created by a business and active on company property is monitored. Companies use remote monitoring software like Wolfeye for many reasons, including but not limited to:

Preventing company information from theft
Gauging employee productivity
Tracking resource utilization
To have evidence in the event of legal proceedings

Employee monitoring occurs through more than just monitoring software. Recording time and attendance, security camera footage, and GPS tracking in company vehicles are all types of employee monitoring. Without monitoring, companies would not have data to use to improve their processes and customer services

Are Employee Monitoring and Spying the Same?

Although they sound similar at first glance, employee monitoring and spying differ greatly. Employers have a right to know what is going on in their space during working hours, mainly because they pay for the technology used. Any surveillance that is done for security and productivity purposes is monitoring.

Spying occurs when employees are being watched in private spaces like the bathroom, or when monitoring devices are placed in personal vehicles or anywhere outside the workplace. Spying on others for personal gain is a crime subject to legal action and imprisonment if severe enough.

Monitoring exists for a practical purpose, whereas spying is an invasion of privacy. Any company software is fair game for monitoring, but it crosses into spying when your employer decides to track the activity on software or devices not used in the workplace. Employees should never be monitored in private areas

Do not connect personal devices to the work internet, as they can be tracked as well. If you want to avoid the possibility of employers tracking personal devices on company wifi, consider purchasing and installing a VPN. However, monitoring is typically kept to company-issued devices. The case of spying makes the ethical and legal lines of employee monitoring blurry.

How To Notice If You Are Being Monitored At Work

The following are signs that your employer is actively tracking your activity:

You notice unfamiliar processes and programs running in the background on your computer
Your computer gets large uploads or downloads when you are not online
You receive explicit notifications about data tracking
You receive notifications and popups from unusual sources
Your computer is running slower than usual and you are unable to complete tasks

If your employer has not been upfront with you about monitoring and you start noticing this type of activity, ask them if they have a policy for it in place. On the other hand, if you notice things out of the ordinary and you know you are being monitored, it is a good idea to review the policy as it can change regularly.

Conclusion

Employers can monitor calls and meetings on Teams via their Admin Center or a third-party monitoring software like Wolfeye. Monitoring assists in tracking productivity and discovering areas of improvement. Monitoring is not the same as spying, and it is possible to conduct monitoring ethically and legally. Any device on a company wifi network can be subject to monitoring at any time.

Sources

Articles.

How to Monitor Access to Your Computer

How to Monitor Access to Your Computer Do you have a nagging feeling that someone might be accessing your computer …