Are my remote employees working? What Teams presence shows

If you typed this question into a search bar, you manage people you cannot see, and you want an honest read on whether the hours you think are happening are actually happening. That is a reasonable thing to want. Here is the straight answer up front: no tool can prove that a remote employee is "working" in the sense you mean. What you can get is a directional read on who is online, when, and for how long, plus a heads-up when someone's presence looks gamed. For most managers, that read turns out to be the useful thing, and it often surprises them.

The green dot shows one moment, not the whole story

A glance tells you what the dot says right now. Presence history, the same Teams presence recorded over weeks, shows you the pattern, and the pattern often cuts against the glance in one of two ways.

• Always green, rarely around. At a glance, this person is the model employee: Available every time you look. The history can tell a different story: hours of unbroken Available with no idle time at all, or status changes at robotically even intervals. Those are the patterns a mouse jiggler or keep-alive script tends to leave. They are patterns worth a look, not proof of anything, and there can be an ordinary explanation.
• Always yellow, online after hours. At a glance, this person looks away half the day. The timeline can show steady presence in the evening, after the office has gone quiet. The yellow you noticed at 2pm was never the whole picture, and the person you worried about may be online for more hours than a glance suggests.

Many managers expect the first case. The second can be the bigger surprise, and it is the reason to read the pattern instead of the glance.

What presence can and cannot tell you

Presence is the colored dot Teams already computes for every person: available, away, busy, or offline. On its own, the dot only shows now. Presence history is that same state recorded as it changes, so you can look back across a week or a month instead of guessing. Here is the honest boundary of what that gives you.

Read that table both ways. The left column is the directional read most managers actually want: who is online, when, how much, and whether anyone's presence looks gamed. The right column is everything presence is not. Presence isn't productivity, and you should be suspicious of anything that claims to settle "are they working." We compare the two approaches in Microsoft Productivity Score vs presence tracking.

Why no tool can prove "working"

Work is not visible from the outside. A person staring out a window may be solving your hardest problem. A person typing furiously may be replying to a group chat. Effort and output do not map to any external signal you can passively collect.

Some heavier monitoring software leads with productivity scores, interval screenshots, and keystroke or mouse-movement metrics. Those can be gamed too, and they cost more than the license: an agent has to go on every laptop and be rolled out and maintained, and recording screens or keystrokes is a different category from reading a status your platform already computes, with heavier notice obligations to match. We go deeper on that trade in a fair way to track remote work hours.

Use it to start a conversation

The right way to use any of this is as a starting point, not a scorecard. Presence history describes what someone's status showed, not why. A gap might be a dentist appointment, a deep-work block with notifications off, a timezone you forgot, or a genuine pattern worth addressing. The data does not know which.

So when a pattern stands out, you open a conversation. You bring the timeline, you ask what is going on, and you listen. Used that way, presence tracking is a small, transparent signal that helps you ask a fair question and have a better-informed one-on-one than a hunch would give you. Three habits keep it fair.

• Tell your team. The difference between fair monitoring and the kind people resent is whether they know it is happening. We recommend telling your team that their presence is tracked, and why.
• Collect the minimum. A directional read on online time does not require screen recordings or a per-minute activity feed. More data is not more insight, it is more liability.
• Check the pattern before you judge. Any signal tells you what happened, not why. Presence data should never be the only basis for a decision about someone. Lead with the conversation.

How Presify helps

Presify is a Microsoft Teams presence tracker. It tracks presence for your whole team and keeps the history, so you can see who's online, when, and for how long.

• See the pattern. A presence timeline for each person and each team, every recorded status change on a 24-hour day view, and online-time totals and trends, with up to a year of history depending on your plan.
• Spot presence that looks gamed. Six automatic flags surface unusual presence patterns. Four (unbroken Available, no idle, robotic regularity, no activity variation) are the patterns a mouse jiggler or keep-alive script tends to leave; overnight presence and weekend uniformity mark unusual hours, which can just as easily be someone working late. Each flag shows how it's calculated, so it is something you can read and question. Standard includes the Idle suppression flag; all six run on Pro and Scale.
• Quick and light. One read-only Microsoft sign-in by an admin, about five minutes, and nothing installed on anyone's laptop. Presify samples presence through the Microsoft Graph presence API on a short, regular interval, plus the basic directory fields it needs to label users and each person's Outlook time zone. No screenshots, no keystrokes, and no message, chat, call, file, or calendar content.
• Bounded and scoped. Your data is scoped to your Microsoft tenant and processed on US infrastructure. History is trimmed automatically by your plan, and per-user and workspace-wide deletion are built in. Guests are never tracked, and people whose Microsoft 365 location is in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, or Canada are excluded automatically. More detail lives on the security page.

Need screenshots, keystroke logging, app and URL tracking, or timesheets? Presify isn't that tool. If an honest, directional read on who's online, when, and how much is what you are after, see how Presify works, or start with one Microsoft sign-in.

This article is general information, not legal advice. It does not address your specific circumstances, and laws differ by jurisdiction and change over time. Consult your own attorney before acting on it.