Presence reports for one-on-ones and reviews

At some point a presence question attaches to a person. Someone shows green all day but is hard to reach when it counts. The teammate you had pegged as always yellow turns out to be online most evenings. Or a review is coming up and "available when the team needs them" is part of the role. In each case you want the same thing: a calm, factual record you can put on the table, talk through together, and stand behind.

That record is a starting point for a conversation, not the end of one. That idea carries the whole post, and it is how we built Presify, a Microsoft Teams presence tracker. A presence history tells you what someone's Microsoft Teams status showed over a window of time: when they were online, and for how long. It does not tell you why, and it does not decide anything. The green dot shows one moment, and even weeks of history are not the whole story, which is exactly why the record should open the conversation rather than close it. Used badly it becomes a gotcha, and a gotcha breaks the trust that makes the conversation worth having.

This article is general information, not legal or HR advice. Performance, attendance, and monitoring decisions touch employment territory that varies by jurisdiction and by your own policies. Confirm your approach with HR or counsel, and give any legally required notice, before relying on a presence record in a personnel conversation.

What presence history is, and what it is not

Teams already computes a presence state for each person, the colored dot that reads as available, away, busy, or offline, but it does not remember: the dot shows you now, and only now. A presence history is that same state sampled on a regular interval and recorded over time, so you can look back across a week or a month instead of reconstructing it from a hunch.

Two limits are worth saying out loud first. Presence is not a measure of work: it records when someone's status showed as online in Teams, and for how long, not the quality of their output or hours put in somewhere your tenant cannot see. A senior engineer heads-down on a hard problem and a person genuinely checked out can produce the same quiet afternoon on a chart. And presence shows what the status displayed, not why. Status reflects calendar, calls, manual settings, and idle detection, all with ordinary explanations, so the value of treating it as directional is that you ask the person for the why rather than supplying your own.

Why "how it's calculated" is the point

What separates a record that helps a conversation from one that poisons it is whether the other person can see how it was built. A black-box score makes you defend a number you cannot fully explain against a conclusion they had no way to anticipate. A presence record earns its place by being legible instead. Anyone in the room should be able to follow:

• The source. It reads Teams presence states through the Microsoft Graph presence API, sampled on a short, regular interval. Not screen recording, not keystroke logging, nothing installed on a device.
• The window. A specific date range, with totals scoped to it, so a slow week is not smuggled in to color a strong month.
• The method. Online-time totals are the sum of recorded online time over the window, not a guess. When an anomaly is flagged, the pattern comes with how it's calculated: what was measured, against what threshold, over what period.

That legibility is the posture HR will expect if a conversation escalates. For the mechanics of producing the report, see how to get a Teams presence report.

Bringing it to a one-on-one

A one-on-one is the low-stakes, high-value place to use presence well, because the goal is understanding, not a finding. Lead with the question, not the chart. "I've had trouble reaching you in the afternoons and wanted to check in" opens a conversation; sliding a printout across the table opens a defense. Bring the record to support a question you are genuinely asking, and leave room for the clean explanation you did not have: a standing commitment, a time-zone shift, focus work with Teams deliberately closed. If the pattern was real, you now have a shared, specific picture; if not, you corrected your own read before it hardened into a judgment.

It works in the other direction too. If the record shows someone you had quietly written off regularly online in the evenings, a one-on-one is where you say you noticed, give credit for it, and check that the load is sustainable. That is often the most useful thing a presence record does: it changes your read on someone before a review, not after.

Tell people the record exists, too. Presence produced as a surprise is the fastest way to lose a team, regardless of what any law permits. The fair version is the open one: your team knows presence is tracked and that the history informs conversations rather than substituting for them.

Bringing it to a review or an HR conversation

The bar rises as the stakes do, and a few principles hold across reviews, performance plans, and any HR-adjacent discussion.

Never make presence the sole basis for a decision about a person. This is the firmest line in the post. Presence is one input, and the narrowest, because it speaks only to when someone showed as online. Compensation, promotion, ratings, and especially discipline or separation demand the full picture: actual output, stakeholder input, and context only a manager and HR can weigh. A presence chart can corroborate or complicate that picture, but it cannot carry the decision, and treating it as if it could is both unfair and, in many places, legally fraught.

Keep it to the window and the role: pull the date range that matches the review period, and tie any observation to a stated expectation of the job, such as coverage during the hours the team supports. And loop in HR or counsel before the conversation, not after. Notice requirements, documentation standards, and what may be used in a formal process vary by jurisdiction and by your own policies. We sketch the US picture in is it legal to track employee Teams status, but a blog post is not your lawyer, and this is where you check.

How Presify is built for this

We built Presify so the fair version is the default one.

• A record built for a date range. Presify stores each presence change it samples and builds timelines, online-time trends, and anomaly flags, per person and per team. Reports export to Excel for the window you choose, with a methodology sheet so the methodology travels with the file into the meeting.
• Anomaly flags that show their work. Six flags surface presence that looks gamed, such as Available for hours with no break or no idle time at all. Every flag carries the measurement and threshold behind it, so it is a pattern you can read aloud and the other person can question, not proof and not a black-box score.
• Read-only and minimal. It reads presence (status and activity, such as available, away, busy, or in a call) through the Microsoft Graph presence API on a short, regular interval, plus the basic directory fields it needs to label and scope people and each person's Outlook time zone. It never touches message, chat, call, file, or calendar content. Setup is one read-only Microsoft sign-in, about five minutes, with nothing installed on anyone's device, no screenshots, and no keystroke logging.
• Tenant-isolated, US-based, bounded retention. 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 excluded, and Presify automatically excludes people whose Microsoft directory location is in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, or Canada.

A record fit for a one-on-one or a review is one that shows how it's calculated, that the employee can be told about, and that is never the sole basis for a decision about a person. Used that way, it makes for a better-informed one-on-one: sometimes it confirms a gap, and sometimes it shows you the person who always looked yellow was online far more than a glance suggested. See how Presify tracks Teams presence, or start with one Microsoft sign-in.

This article is general information, not legal or HR advice. Laws and policies differ by jurisdiction and change over time. Confirm your approach with HR or your own attorney, and give any legally required notice, before acting on it.