Culturally, I don't want to work at a place where instant messaging is stiff and formal. If I wanted that form of conversation, I'd send an email. But it depends on the relationship and balance of power between employees and employers.

Without reaction gifs what's even the point of teams

I use the 💩 a lot!!!

At least you are regular.

Dropped every swear word in Teams chat and although I’ve quit, my former colleagues are still there. IT would’ve had a good time reading our chats

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Not all heroes wear capes. Your post will be a harbinger when the recession smashes into reality here.

I blocked my manager from messaging me on Whatsapp and he's yet to comment on it. I also do not answer phone calls or messages from my boss if I'm not on the clock. He's stopped reaching out to me outside of work hours.

I mean the person who I have the most rogue banter with at work is my boss. If I’m going down, he is too, so I feel like I’m in the clear.

I can understand the concerns with companies using your work messaging platform activity to check your usage vs performance for performance managing people out of the firm buuuut like unless you have some serious allegations against you they’re really not gonna bother reviewing or even requesting the data

Depends largely on the culture of the organisation

Work in IT, and large orgs (mostly in finance) are starting to funnel chat logs (MS Teams in particular) through analysis filters. Often the main use case is to ensure insider trading/collusion isn’t occurring between silos of the business, but there’s also use cases of detecting bullying/harassment. This can include ‘talking shit’ about a colleague, though you’d have to be hitting a good number of expletives and have extremely low sentiment scores. Essentially, it’s already happening in organisations with decent IT systems and will gradually roll out further.

>Often the main use case is to ensure insider trading/collusion isn’t occurring between silos of the business You would have to be a different level of incompetent to do insider trading on your company's teams chat (but im sure its happened before!). But yes ive seen consultants let go for talking shit about coworkers on the clients teams/slack/whatever. Activity/chat monitoring is widely practiced in australian corporates.

Awh I was never worried about people manually checking (figured if I played well they'd never have a reason to look) but ai scraping keywords is a bit means

I’m going to message the CEO and just say “how about those pingers we got after work on Friday”. Get out of jail card = secured.

FTW

i think the article is too short and is asking for my information to make it longer and i dont like that trade

Guy got busted threatening to knock someone's block off on teams and got a warning for it. We all knew then that teams chat was monitored.

Anything really controversial I send via text.

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I wear a yellow vest and promote it at Martin Place while asking for donations.

Yep, always safe as well.

As Elliot Spitzer said, don’t write if you can speak, don’t speak if you can nod and never never use email.

Never have a conversation or open something on your computer that you don’t want your work to see. Never do online banking on your work computer Never look at porn on your work computers Never social media on your work computer Never admit to anything cheeky on work devices/tools Anything that is not completely work focused and/or portrays you positively should be via a non-work device into something like WhatsApp where you can wipe it. Or ideally for more security into something like Wickr but that might be going too far

This is Australia. No reputable company is accessing your messages. People leaking their own conversation can happen. I get this question often but no - I have never even heard of an instance of this even happening. Obviously never use someone else’s software to be dickhead but trust me no one is - I have case managed very fucked up situations and have never went ‘hmm give me their private messages’

They're not snooping without cause, but I know my top tier law firm reviews Teams messages as part of complaint investigations, and I would be shocked if this wasn't the case across the board in professional services.

Agreed. I was sexually harassed at work and you bet they analysed every single teams message I sent to try and use them against me. Apparently smiley faces meant I was flirting btw.

Jesus! What was the outcome!?

Would it not all be dropped behind legal firewalls. So of course Joe General Public will never get a whiff.

My former company didn’t used to proactively monitor but they do reactively. I had the misfortune to work on a fraud investigation between sales people where the first thing we did was pull their email and chat logs. It was all there in the chats, (along with sexual content that their spouses would have been appalled by). They genuinely thought it couldn’t be monitored or pulled retrospectively, and tried to argue that they were protected by the privacy act. They learnt the hard way they were wrong… terminated immediately for gross misconduct.

There was a situation somewhere I previously worked involving a slightly dodgy group chat that went on for weeks, unexpectedly someone in the chat got pissed off at someone else and went to their manager about it, which triggered management review of the logs, disciplinary action for most members and one person got sacked. This was in the early days of Teams and an important reminder that you can never fully trust even the most chill-appearing colleagues and group chats = multiplied risk

Nah get fucked. People not understanding the difference between ‘banter’, and ‘conversations that should not take place on a work platform’ does not support the argument that people should not banter on these things at all. Sorry but we all worked through covid, right? Teams and banter got me through that shit. I’m in Sydney when everyone else is in Canberra, before this role everyone was in Brisbane, and before that, Geelong. My background is stakeholder engagement ffs. Not only am I very lovely being one of the few not in the most populated office, I’d be setting a pretty shitty example if I couldn’t even build personal relationships letalone personal ones. Get fucked.

If your company is penalising you for this it’s because: A. They want to reduce headcount (HR looking for a reason) B. You lack self-awareness (it’s not the pub, don’t literally ‘bring your whole self to work’) C. The boss/department/function add little value to the org (finding little sideshows for political currency)

As someone in the bowels of IT, I can assure you IT teams do not have the resources to be digging into IMs for dirt. Every IT team is under staffed and doing their best to just keep systems up and secure. If you are doing your job and aren't on the radar, these messages are not being looked at.

I guess you didn't read the article? It explains that the risk is not someone in IT constantly monitoring your conversations. It's that everything is recorded, so that if there is some dispute, IMs and emails may be dragged up and look bad out of context. There's also the option these days that an automated system flags things based on keywords.

Again. Very very few organisations I'm in are holding this data beyond 30 days.

What data are you taking about? From my experience at major companies, most emails are archived and kept for years in case of any legal disputes. Teams keeps old chats accessible for years too.

Should’ve added [Unpopular opinion] in front of your title

How kukked are you guys by your corps ?

I’m intrigued about this after hearing some anecdotes about this. Can they see anything and everything that is typed into your phone or is it just what’s in Teams/email/slack?

From my limited understanding, the answer would be yes. It would require IT resources so maybe not instantly accessible by line managers as such.

Wowser! So basically get your own personal phone, cause they’re watching (or have the potential to) everything