Sean Percival

Essays · October 2026

Microsoft Teams and the Surveillance State

Oslo
An Edward Hopper-style oil painting of a man in a white shirt alone at his desk in a sunlit office window, looking out over flat city rooftops at a giant green eye hanging in the blue sky like a Teams status dot

I miss the serendipity of the office hallway.

Not in a "things were better" way. Okay, a little in that way. There was a time when you needed something from someone, so you got up and walked to their desk. Or you caught them by the coffee machine and said "hey, can we grab five minutes?" And then you grabbed five minutes. With your faces.

That world is gone. COVID killed it and we're still in the hangover. Work got chatified when work and offices got "distributed". Everything is a message now. If you're lucky, you're stuck in Slack. Most of us aren't lucky. Most of us are in Microsoft Teams.

And with chat came the dot.

The dot

Green means online. Yellow means away. Red means do not disturb, which everyone reads as "disturb, but feel slightly bad about it." Hover over someone and Teams tells you when they were last seen, like a parole officer or a very untrusting lover. Then there's the typing indicator, three little dots, the closest thing modern work has to suspense.

Somewhere along the way we all agreed to let coworkers see, in real time, whether we're at our keyboards. Nobody asked for this. It just shipped.

The vacation that wasn't

I took a few days of vacation recently to attend a wedding. I did the responsible thing. Out-of-office on, a clear status note saying I was not available.

I got a ton of messages anyway. Requests. Questions. Follow-ups to the questions.

This is Norway. We get five weeks of vacation. The whole country goes dark in July and nobody apologizes. Work-life balance here gets roughly the reverence Americans save for the flag and our beloved hamburgers.

So either nobody reads status notes, or the rules quietly changed and nobody sent the memo. Maybe someone sent something on Teams.

The experiment

I did what any annoying ex-startup guy does inside a bigger company. I ran an experiment.

For 30 days I set my Teams status to Appear Offline. No green dot. No "last seen." No sign I'd ever been there. I didn't tell anyone, because that's how experiments work, and also because it was more fun.

I wanted to know two things. Would anyone notice? And would it change how many messages I got? (Most messages, for the record, are distractions. Mine included.)

Who noticed: two people in a month.

One mentioned it on day 2, the other on day 28. Maybe more noticed, but this is Norway, and one does not easily confront a coworker about something (anything).

The data

I compared the 30 days of the experiment to the 90 days before.

  • Total messages: up 14%. Being "offline" did nothing to stop the flow.
  • First contacts (the first ping from someone in a 24-hour window): down 7%. A dent.
  • Unique people messaging me: 63 down to 46. That's 27% fewer humans.

None of this is science. I'm just one guy with a dropdown menu. Still, the volume went up while the audience shrank. The people who needed me kept messaging, more often. The drive-bys, the "quick question?" crowd, the ones who see green and think "oh, he's around," mostly wandered off.

The dot was an invitation. Turn it off and the people with real work still find you. Everyone else finds someone greener.

Minutes vs results

I tell my team this constantly. I don't count minutes. I count results.

Work when you're motivated. Don't when you're not. Need to leave early? Leave. Rolled in late? I genuinely don't care (for my team members reading this, I do care a little). In e-commerce our results are money and growth, and those are easy to see without knowing when someone last touched their keyboard. Results are good, by the way. Not so subtly.

I'm not sure I want a high level of surveillance on the people I work with. This isn't a daycare. I'm not babysitting anyone. It isn't a factory either. The green dot is just a punch clock that never stops punching.

If I'm watching their dots, they're watching mine. Nobody wins a staring contest that runs all day.

Am I the problem?

Am I doing Sean things, playing startup scientist inside a big company? Probably. Is it a little rude to vanish from everyone's live view without telling them? Also probably.

I've since turned the dot back on.

Thirty days dark and barely anyone clocked that I was gone. One green dot and I was back on the menu.

Nobody notices you're missing…but everybody notices you're available.