We’ve all seen the little coloured dot in Microsoft Teams against our colleagues’ names – it changes from red to green to yellow, but does that still have meaning in the way it used to?

I’m going to show my age slightly here by admitting that I remember the good old days of Microsoft Lync. The precursor to Skype for Business, and indeed Microsoft Teams, Lync was (and possibly in some very, very, slow moving companies still is) a meeting, calling, and instant messaging platform used by businesses of all shapes and sizes. 

One of the big selling points of Microsoft Lync was that your ‘presence’ on the system synced with your Outlook calendar and calling activity. This meant that if you were in a meeting, your status icon changed to red and showed you as ‘in a meeting’. If there was a period of inactivity, Lync would change your status to ‘away’… sounds familiar, right? 

The pitch at that time was that with everyone’s presence visible, collaboration could be improved. You could judge the best time to contact colleagues and get a response. If someone is ‘available’, they’re more likely to be able to answer your quick question or take an ad hoc call from you than if they are ‘busy’, ‘away’ or ‘in a meeting’, so you could be sure that your message wouldn’t just end up in an ignored inbox. A solid theory…

A pandemic later and here we are with Microsoft Teams, which offers the same presence visibility but with a fundamental shift; all chats and channels persist over time. This is very different to the snapshot style conversations that you got with Microsoft Lync; every time you contacted a colleague by sending them an Instant Message, you started a ‘new conversation’ and any chat history was somewhat buried in your files automagically. 

With this shift to an asynchronous model in Microsoft Teams, has the idea of ‘presence’ and improving collaboration by making appropriate contact with colleagues lost its way?

Has Teams chat just become another inbox style dumping ground?

When you see your colleague’s status is “In a call”, do you save the chat message until they are available, or do you think; ‘well, I’ll send it now and they can pick it up when they’re finished on their call’? 

I ran a recent poll via LinkedIn and over 50% of respondents said they message people regardless of presence status. 

Add into that mix people whose calendars don’t accurately reflect their availability, making their presence even less meaningful. And we all know those people whose status is almost never green and ‘available’ – if we’re sticking by presence rules, how on earth are you supposed to get in touch with them? 

For organisations using Microsoft Teams, I think this is part of a communication culture that needs to be addressed. If presence doesn’t really matter and it’s ok to contact colleagues any time, let’s tell them that. If presence should be respected, let’s encourage people to check statuses before reaching out, and using features like ‘notify when available’ to send messages or make calls when colleagues actually are available. 

Without addressing the organisational culture of using Teams, it becomes in real danger of just being another inbox to check, rather than a true collaboration enabler.