What Can My Employer See On Microsoft Teams? Know It All

If you are on the business plan of your organization, then anything you do on Microsoft Teams or any other MS Office apps will be visible to your employer. From the moment you log in, your employer can keep track of your calls, meetings, chats, etc.

They can also see the time you have spent online and the time you have spent away from work. This is how employers keep a report of the work you are doing in remote jobs.

Let us do a deep dive into what your employer can see on Microsoft Teams.

Things Your Employer Can See On Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams host excellent visual meetings involving the members of the team. It is easy to start a meeting. The meeting host doesn’t have to send the links individually. With a single click, all team members are immediately notified of a meeting.

Microsoft Teams has an admin center, from where the admin can access and extract information about your activities on the apps. Your employer will have to sign in to office.com to do that.

Only the administrator can access this data, and even higher privileges for admin roles are needed to access some reports.

Compliance

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, click on “… Show all” in the left-hand side menu. Among the options that appear, click on “Compliance”.

In the Microsoft Purview (formerly called Microsoft 365 compliance center), the admin can look through everything that Microsoft has to offer, including Teams, Skype, emails, etc. The content of any private channels you formed within teams and even the direct messages you sent are accessible by the admin.

In the “Content search” option under Solutions on the left side, the admin can search for anything across all Microsoft 365 apps. The search can be optimized by specific keywords or adding conditions such as message type, sender/author, subject/title, date, location, and much more.

Your employer can see when you send a message on a channel and the contents of those messages. The contents of a chat you deleted are also visible. So, be careful not to say anything malicious or unethical, because your employer will have a record of it.

Microsoft Teams Admin Center

To go to the Microsoft teams’ admin center, in the Microsoft 365 admin center, click on “Teams” in the left-hand side menu and go to “Analytics & reports”.

Your employer and admin can view several types of reports here and filter them by date range as well.

Each report can be exported to Excel for better analysis and can be filtered for specific teams or users.

Let’s take a look at some of these reports:

Apps Usage

In the Apps usage under usage reports, the admin and employer can see the different apps used by teams, whether they are Microsoft apps or other third-party apps.

The Teams app usage report in the Microsoft Teams admin center provides insights about which apps users are using in Teams. The employer and admin can gain insights into the app activity in your organization for different Microsoft like (Viva learning, Shifts, PowerPoint, Project, Power Automate, etc), third-party (Polly, Trello, etc.) & Line of Business (LOB) Teams apps.

The app usage report can be viewed for trends over the last 7, 30, 90, and 180 days.

The employer and admin must be either a global admin, global reader, or Teams service admin to view the reports in the Microsoft Teams admin center.

But please note that this report shows only the Apps which are available as part of Microsoft Teams (provided by your organization) and not the Apps installed on your device.

The Apps installed on your device can be tracked by Intune, for example.

Call Details

If you are on the company’s calling plan, then the admin can also view your calling history. They can see how many minutes you spent on calls and how much each of these calls costs the company.

Teams Device Usage

In the Teams device usage report, your company can see which type of device you used to log into teams, such as mac, iOS, Android, Windows, Web, etc.

They also have access to more technical details, such as the IP address of the device you are using and it’s brand and model number. The type of microphone and speaker you use during meetings is also visible.

Teams Usage

In the teams’ usage report, the admin can see the list of teams and a detailed account of all the messages posted in team channels. The employer can see the active users, active channels, replies, channel texts, urgent texts, meetings organized, mentions, reactions, and even memes!

Admin can click on a team to see what each member has been up to, from the meetings they attended to their call history. The call duration and participants of the call are also visible.

Teams User Activity

With teams’ user activity reports, the admin can analyze each user’s activity.

They can get an overview of the total channel messages, reply texts, posts, chat messages, total meetings, organized meetings, one-on-one calls, audio time, video time, screen sharing time, and the last date the user was active.

Users

Apart from Analytics and reports, some additional user-level information can also be viewed by selecting “Users” in the Microsoft Teams admin center menu.

This will display the names of all the employees at the company along with their personal information such as username, location, phone number, online/offline status, policies assigned to them, etc.

By clicking on each individual, the admin can see the number of meetings and calls someone has been on and the quality of those calls in the last 7 days. A detailed account of the employee’s call history and policies is also available to the admin.

Reports

Back at the Microsoft 365 admin center, there are some additional higher-level reports available.

Go to “Reports” in the left-side menu, the following report options will appear:

Productivity Score

This report scores the productivity of your organization based on how much use you are getting out of the tools offered by Microsoft 365. People’s experiences are based on how much they are communicating, the number of meetings they are having, and how much the teams are collaborating.

Usage

Microsoft 365 usage report shows how different users are engaging with the Microsoft apps and services. A graph will appear with the number of aggregate active users for a particular app or service.

Down below, there will be the usage report for each service and app. Even the number of emails sent and received is visible. Microsoft teams activity and OneDrive files are also available to review.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed all the different reports that your employer can see on Microsoft Teams.

The answer to what your boss can see on Microsoft teams is everything! Every time you click on something, a report of it is recorded and can be accessed by your employer because it is the company’s intellectual property.

But don’t be alarmed because your employer cannot get access to your activity without going through a long line of formalities.

First of all, they must have good reason to see someone’s messages or calls. Then, they would have to work with HR, Security, and the IT department to gain access to employee data. It is important to have a record of this data in case of a lawsuit or an investigation.

> Learn more on how to run Azure Cloud Shell in Microsoft Teams.

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-Charbel Nemnom-