A fair way to track remote work hours

A fair way to track remote work hours is to keep a directional record of when each person is online in Teams, and for how long, and to tell your team you keep it. Online time is not the same as work, so the record is a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict. The glance at the green dot does not give you that, because the dot shows one moment, not the whole story. Someone can stay green all day and barely be around (a mouse jiggler keeps Teams showing Available). Someone who always looks yellow might be doing their best work at 11pm.

So the question is not whether to track. The question is how to get a directional read you can trust, fair to the people on the other end, without rolling out monitoring software to every laptop. This post is our answer, because building Presify forced us to think hard about where the line is.

What does fair tracking look like?

Fair tracking is open, minimal, and read as a pattern, and it comes down to a short set of principles you can hold yourself to.

• Be transparent. Tell people. The biggest difference between fair monitoring and the kind people resent is whether the team knows it is happening. If you would be uncomfortable saying out loud what you keep, that is the signal.
• Collect the minimum. Capture the least that answers your actual question. To know when people are online and how much, you do not need screen recordings, keystrokes, or a per-minute activity feed. More data is not more insight, it is more liability.
• Track presence, not keystrokes. Decide what you are trying to know. For most teams it is when people are online and how much, not "is this person typing right now." The second question is harder to answer honestly and easier to game.
• Read the pattern, not one afternoon. Any signal tells you what happened, not why. Look at weeks, not a single moment, and use what you see to start a conversation. The moment tracking becomes a gotcha, you have lost the team.
• Give any legally required notice. Depending on where your people work, you may have specific notice or consent obligations. Connecticut and Delaware, for example, have employer monitoring-notice laws (Delaware's covers telephone, email, and internet monitoring); check with counsel whether one applies. Plan for that up front.

Legal notice deserves a flag of its own: this post is general information, not legal advice. Notice and consent rules vary by jurisdiction and change over time, and they can turn on facts specific to your organization. We go deeper on the US picture in is it legal to track employee Teams status, but for your situation, confirm with your own counsel.

Do most teams need heavier monitoring?

Most teams do not. Screenshot capture, keystroke logging, and "productivity scores" promise certainty, but for an ordinary team they bring three problems.

First, they are heavy to run. Most of these tools install an agent on every laptop, which has to be rolled out, updated, and supported, and which only sees the devices it is installed on.

Second, they measure the wrong thing. A keystroke or mouse-movement score rewards activity-theater. The person who runs a mouse jiggler and keeps a doc open scores well, while the person who thinks for twenty minutes before writing three good sentences scores badly. A meter that counts mouse movement sees a jiggler as activity, which is exactly backwards.

Third, the more a tool records, the more comes with it. Recording screen content or capturing keystrokes is a different category from reading a status your platform already computes. The notice rules and the trust cost that attach to it are heavier.

None of this means those vendors are villains. There are narrow, regulated situations where intensive monitoring is genuinely required. But for a team that just wants to know who is online, when, and how much, that machinery is more than the question needs.

Where presence history fits

There is a much lighter signal that answers the everyday question: Microsoft Teams presence, kept over time. Teams already computes a presence state for each person, the colored dot that reads as available, away, busy, or offline. What it does not do is remember: the dot shows you now, and only now.

Presence history is that same state recorded as it changes. You can then see who was online, when, and for how long across a week or a month, instead of guessing from a glance.

A few weeks of that record fill in the rest of the story. The person who is green all day with no idle time and no variation shows up as a pattern worth a look. The person who looks yellow at 2pm but is steadily online in the evening shows up too, and gets the credit a glance would have missed.

The narrowness is the point. Presence history is read-only: nothing installed on anyone's machine, no screenshots, no keystroke logging. It is not a productivity score and cannot tell you what someone was doing or how well. It is directional: the lightest signal that answers a real question, easy to disclose, and pointed toward a conversation.

A short checklist for doing it fairly

If you want a defensible, low-drama approach, this is the whole thing:

1. Decide the one question you need answered. For most teams it is who is online, when, and how much.
2. Tell your team, in plain language, what you track and why, in a written policy.
3. Collect the minimum that answers it. Skip screen and keystroke capture unless you have a specific reason.
4. Keep it only as long as you need it.
5. Use it as context for a conversation, never as a silent scorecard or the only basis for a decision about someone.
6. Confirm any notice or consent obligations for the places your people work, with your own counsel.

Follow those six and you land in the same defensible posture most thoughtful organizations do, without rolling out monitoring software to every laptop.

How Presify helps

Presify is a Microsoft Teams presence tracker built around those principles. 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, and every status change on a 24-hour day view. Online-time totals and trends come with it, 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 device. Presify samples presence through the Microsoft Graph presence API on a short, regular interval. It also reads 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.

Presence isn't productivity. Presify gives you a directional read on when people are online and how much, and flags patterns worth a look. What you do with it starts with a conversation, and we recommend telling your team that presence is tracked.

Need screenshots, keystroke logging, app and URL tracking, or timesheets? Presify isn't that tool. For an honest read on who's online, when, and how much, read Presify for remote and hybrid teams, see how Presify works, or start with one Microsoft sign-in. Setup takes about five minutes.

Everything here is general information, not legal advice. Nothing here addresses your specific circumstances, and laws differ by jurisdiction and change over time. Consult your own attorney before acting on it.