The remote work trend is on the rise thanks to the benefits and convenience it offers. Did you ever worry how your boss could see what you’re doing? Learning more about Microsoft Teams today can help answer any fears you may have!

To check what the employer sees, log in into the Microsoft 365 admin center. 

Here I’m going to show you the type of information your admin has access to, and what they can extract from the system.

So Teams has its own dedicated admin center. 

Go to Show all, and go to the Teams admin center.

Now let’s take a look at the different reports that are available to them. So under analytics and reports, we have different reports available.

So for example, app usage. Let’s go with the last 30 days, and run the report.

So here we can see the different types of apps that are used within Teams. In this case, there are four Microsoft apps, and two third-party apps.

Now, this information is not by user, it’s in general. So we can see they’re two active users that use Trello, there four active users that use Teams, and so on.

But we can’t see which user used this application here. 

Let’s go back to our reports.

If your company has calling plans in place, you can get information about the number of minutes that users spent in calls and also the cost of the calls, by running these reports. 

Under Teams device usage, you get to see what type of device they’re using to get to Teams.

Whether it’s Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and so on. 

What about Teams usage?

Let’s go and run this report and see what we get. So here we have the list of the different Teams and we get to see how many messages were posted within a Team, how many replies there were, urgent messages, reactions, mentions and meetings that were organized in the Team.

Now if you click on a Team, you get to see all the members of the Team and if you click on a specific member, you can find out a bit more about their activity in Teams. 

For example, this below person was in two meetings and one call.

Under call history, you get to see all the calls that this person was in. You can also see the duration of the call and the participants.

You also have more technical information about the devices they used for connection and also the IP address and so on. 

Now let’s go back to the usage reports and see what we have under the Teams user activity.

When I run the report here, I get an overview of the total number of channel messages, reply messages, and so on, but here I have the display name of the people and their activity in Teams. 

So how many channel messages does each person send.

Reply messages, post messages, chat messages, total meetings. So here it’s by user and not global anymore.

So how many one-on-one calls there was, the total audio time, total video time, and even screen sharing time, and their last activity. It doesn’t have a time stamp, it just has the date of their last activity.

Okay, so this is the information they can see by the user.

Now what we looked at here is for Teams only.

But what about the other apps? Do we get more information in person?

Well, let’s go back to the Microsoft 365 admin center. Let’s take a look at reports.

Here we have the productivity score. Now, this is on organizational level only.

So here it says, scores are not provided at the individual user level. This way you get to compare your organization to a peer benchmark.

It breaks it down into different categories as well, but all of this is on an organizational level. Now let’s go to usage and see what we get here.

These reports show how people in the business are using 365 services. If I scroll down I can see how many active users are using Microsoft 365 services and I can see this by service.

Then I get to see the Microsoft 365 apps, but again this is general. So this is on organization level, I can’t exactly see here which active user is using this app.

I can also see email activity and Microsoft Teams activity. But let’s take a closer look at this report here, so let’s go to view more, and let’s scroll down.

You get to see all the user names, and I can see their last activities for certain services. So here when was the last time the user read or sent an email?

When was the last time they did something in OneDrive, or they did do something in SharePoint, in Skype? Then we have Yammer here, and the last activity is in Microsoft Teams.

Okay, so this is the information we get on the user level. The other information is all available on an organizational level.

Conclusion

So this is what can be currently tracked with Microsoft Teams. In my experience, working with a remote team, it’s always better to assign tasks and objectives.

For example, using Planner, rather than micro-managing each person and tracking their working hours.