Soon Your Whole Life Will Be in Microsoft Teams, and That Might Not Be Good
This week, Microsoft announced some new features coming for Teams, including some specifically designed to help employees maintain some stress management and avoid burnout. Things like a virtual commute, and a partnership with Headspace for meditations.
Which is interesting for a business collaboration tool, right?
I think that Microsoft is recognizing the reality of the situation though, that many workplaces that flipped the switch on Teams, did so because they were thrust into working remotely without much of a plan, and Teams offered a collaboration platform that didn’t require much to implement. And, now that everyone did flip the switch, we are also starting to recognize the reality of what happens when you have an always-on tool like Teams lurking in the background of everything we do digitally. Teams is on our work laptops, it’s on our tablets, and it’s probably on our phones. Heck, I even have it on my MacBook, so I can easily respond to anything when I’m watching TV and just surfing social media or writing a blog post.
We are, literally, on Teams all of the time, so it only makes sense that MS try to give us even more things to do in the platform.
Soon we’ll be able to connect it to LinkedIn.We’ll be able to do some meditation, and perform various stress breaks. We already have phone calls, meetings, chats, and all kinds of other activities going on, soon we’ll even be able to get a transcript of meetings if we want.
Which sounds all well and good, except for one thing. All that stuff we are chatting about, all those documents we are sharing, all the activities we are taking part in, notes we are taking, and everything else we do, is stored in M365.
It’s all discoverable too.
Look, I spend a lot of my day testing M365 and Teams data in regards to eDiscovery. I know that every, single, bit of information that is in Teams, is searchable. Which means, that some admin in your company can locate and track all of this data if they are asked to, and you have no control over any of that.
So, the next time you are going to miss a deadline, your boss might go take a look at how much time you spent chatting with coworkers about non-work stuff, or how much time you spent meditating, or virtually commuting. I would hope no one would go this route, but knowing that it’s possible, means that someone will.
So, maybe we should think about not doing everything in Teams. No one needs that much insight into our daily lives. 😉
