Can You Track Your Employees on Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a useful collaborative tool that allows managers to engage with employees. The application has been lauded for making it easy for these managers to interact with employees, whether they are working from the office or remotely.

As the FinanceOnline website explains, among the many functionalities of Microsoft Teams are real-time collaborations, video conferencing, and even file sharing. But how about tracking?

According to the above source, Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool for facilitating employee management and monitoring and is quite comprehensive. Accordingly, this tool allows managers to track chats, meetings, and even video calls by employees.

Essentially, you can track virtually everything employees do in the Teams environment. But how exactly does this work? 

You can track employee activity on Teams using the following key features of this tool:

Power BI App

Microsoft Teams allows administrators to create Power BI reports within the app. This data visualization application provides a summary of each team’s workspace.

To monitor user activity using the Power BI app feature, follow these simple steps:

1. Activate the Power BI license in teams by signing in to the service.
2. Open the Power BI applications within Teams.
3. Select Create from the options on the top menu bar.
4. Under Create, select the option Analyze your Teams data.

One of the significant strengths of the Power BI feature in Teams is that it makes it easy to automatically create and display these reports in the Power BI app. You can then view these reports either in Teams or the app, download, edit, or make a copy of the report.

There are three main pages on the Teams activity analytics page:

• My activity page
• Teams activity page
• Team activity details page

The activity page provides a summary of your recent activities in teams. The standard period is the past 31 days, but you can modify this parameter to your preferred number of days. On the other hand, the Team activity page lets you view the list of activities for all teams.

The Team activity details page narrows this even further, letting you select an individual team and view the activities related to this team for the past ninety days.

Microsoft 365 Reports

The Microsoft 365 Reports feature is one of the most powerful tools on Teams that support employee monitoring. This feature allows you to monitor how employees in your company or business utilize Microsoft 365 services across the organization.

To access these reports, follow the following simple guidelines:

1. Access the Teams admin center from https://admin.microsoft.com. Be sure you are assigned either the Teams administrator role or the global administrator.
2. Select the Show all option on the left menu tab.
3. Click on Report and then select Usage under the expanded Reports tab.

From the Usage window that appears, you can easily see the usage reports of different Microsoft Teams services. It also shows you which services are used most by your employees. You can scroll down the Usage page to view additional reports from the available activity cards.

Select the view more option.

For instance, you can determine how users access emails by accessing the email activities card. Simply select View More from the email activities tab.

While the reports page does not provide user information to protect user privacy, you can change this if you have Global administrator privileges by following the steps below:

1. Select the Settings tab from the left-hand menu tabs.
2. Under Settings, scroll down the list of services and choose Reports.
3. Deselect the ‘Display concealed user group and site names in all reports’ option.
4. Here, you can access user-level data on employee activities.