The green dot is watching, and it thinks you left at four

Comparisons of presence indicators usually pick a winner. This one picks the circumstances, which is more useful.

The indicator measures the keyboard

A presence dot turns amber or grey after a period without keyboard or mouse input, which is the only signal the client can observe. Reading a document, thinking about a problem, sketching on paper or being in a conversation all register as absence.

That makes the indicator a measure of typing rather than of working, and it is treated as the latter by almost everyone who looks at it. The people whose work involves the most reading and thinking are therefore the ones the indicator represents worst. Nobody designed it as a surveillance tool, and it functions as one because of how it is read rather than how it is built.

Visible availability changes what people optimise for

When responsiveness is observable and output is not, rational people optimise for responsiveness, which is the measured thing. That produces fast replies, fragmented attention and a working day assembled from interruptions, all of which look excellent on a dashboard. Deep work requires uninterrupted blocks, which are indistinguishable from absence to any system watching input activity.

Teams that explicitly agree on expected response times, rather than leaving it implicit, largely remove the problem. The agreement is the intervention, and the tooling is almost irrelevant once it exists.

Mouse jigglers are a symptom, not a scandal

Devices and scripts that simulate input exist because the indicator is read as a performance measure and people respond to measures. Their existence is usually reported as employee dishonesty and is better understood as a predictable response to a bad proxy.

Once the introductory rate lapses, any measurement used for evaluation becomes a target and stops measuring what it measured, which is an old and reliable observation. Organisations that responded by detecting jigglers escalated an arms race rather than addressing the measurement. The ones that responded by ignoring the indicator got a better outcome for no cost whatsoever.

Monitoring beyond the dot

Some organisations deploy activity monitoring that records applications, keystrokes, screenshots or webcam images, which is a substantially different thing. Legal requirements around notification, consent, proportionality and works council involvement vary enormously between jurisdictions.

Somewhere in the release notes, in several regions covert monitoring of employees is tightly restricted and requires a demonstrable and proportionate justification. Employees generally have a right to know what is collected, and in some places a right to see the data held about them.

Anyone concerned about this should check local employment and privacy rules, because the position differs greatly between countries.

The always-on expectation

Chat tools create an implicit expectation of immediate response that email, with its slower norms, never quite established. Several jurisdictions have introduced a right to disconnect, restricting expected contact outside working hours, with varying scope and enforcement. Scheduled sending, which holds a message until working hours, is available in most tools and is the single most considerate feature in any of them.

A manager who messages at midnight sets a norm regardless of what they say about expectations, because behaviour outranks policy. Using scheduled send costs nothing and removes an entire category of anxiety from a team.

Plenty of this is legal, which is rather the point — the complaint is that it is allowed, not that it is criminal.

Working sanely inside it

Set your status deliberately with a note about what you are doing and when you will respond, since specific information ends the speculation. Agree response-time norms in writing with your team, which converts an anxious guess into a shared standard.

On hold for the fourth time, block focus time in the calendar so the absence is explained by something the system can see. Turn off notifications during those blocks, because being visible and being interrupted are not the same requirement. And treat the dot as what it is, which is a report on your keyboard rather than a report on you.

Side by side

The takeaway

Set a status with a time in it, and agree response norms in writing.

The fix is usually trivial, which is the most annoying part.