In reply to a post by broadband66:

Are you not forced to pay tax and national insurance?

If a company you work for uses a particular product then you are required to use that product.

Tax and national insurance is the facty of life and also pay for services.


As i said to them at work, if they want me to use Teams, then they supply the hardware, it is not required, and they are not really forcing us, but they are pushing it, hard. I doubt they could force people anyway, some people don't have smartphones.
i don't see the point in it, if they want to tell me something then do so to my face after all they are in the same building.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

i don't see the point in it, if they want to tell me something then do so to my face after all they are in the same building.

I suspect your direct management are being pushed by their direct management as its probably a company wide initiative.

I suspect that if they did supply you with a smartphone that allowed you to participate in their Team sessions and said you are also free to use the phone for your own use that you would be suspicious that they would then be trying to track your personal usage and use that against you if they decided to.

Actually back in the 90s the company I used to work for offered us each a phone for support purposes that we could also use for personal usage but we said no thanks we will stick with the single support phone that gets passed around to whoever was on call that week.

In reply to a post by dect:

I suspect your direct management are being pushed by their direct management as its probably a company wide initiative.

It started as a trial for 4 weeks ion October last year, in three areas, we and another area has chat and groups, the other one had chat only. As far as i know it have not gone any further and no other areas have had it, Managers have had teams for around 4 years I think.
Yammer is also available and while i don't use that either, I do chat to people at work who does and the local group or our store group of yammer had a fair few people using it, and then they closed that group and transferred it to teams to try and get people to use it, but i think about 5 people use it regular, plus the managers.
the store manager put a notice on about what is on and asked people to like it, so he knows how many people read it, someone said there was about 8 likes, which out of a work place that have nearly 400 people that is pretty bad.

My department manager is really trying to get people to use it, even asking people to put their holiday requests in via it, as the system we use to put holiday request in was hacked last year and still not up and running for us. I gave her mine on a bit of paper on saturday.

Surly five months is more than enough time to realise that Teams is dead meat and the majority of people are not going to use it, the idea is that we can chat to colleagues, get hold of managers and post to the local group about things.
not being funny, but i can do that face to face, so why do we need a app to do it? It is different if you are on the road or in different offices or even in a large building, but easy enough to use a phone.

It seems like the old way of speaking face to face is vanishing, want to tell people something, put it on a notice board, they just spent money putting up notice boards and they are not being used.

i know what you will say, it is the sign of the times and technology, but technology can be hacked, as have been proved by our holiday booking system being hacked.

You are correct, but surly they can have a phone just with Teams on? But we have nearly 400 people at work, so I doubt they would give out phones.

I don't know, maybe I just give up and go with the flow, but I have enough stuff on my phone as it is, and I always said I don't want anything to do with work on my phone. Even when I book holidays, I used their website and not the app, or I did before the system, was subjected to ransomware, got more info that way as well as I was able to see who was in on the same day as me.

Where I work they have integrated Yammer in to the Teams main menu. This was to try and get people to use Yammer as almost everyone likes Teams, but most hate Yammer (apart from the show off type crowd).

Teams has its place even in a single office location. Got to be going on 20 years ago the when the company started using Lotus Notes Sametime (or something similar sounding), and this was a call centre so they certainly had a lot of phones, but many still preferred to get a quick response by this over email or phone call, or heaven forbid getting off their seats.

In reply to a post by gary333:

Lotus Notes Sametime (or something similar sounding)

Lotus (company) Sametime (product). We used it too. As well as Notes. I see Notes & Sametime are still around, now owned by HCL. (via IBM).

My company moved to Slack. Ugh.

You just reminded me, one of my old clients (a large financial services company based in Reading…) was a big adopter user of Notes IM / Sametime. This would’ve been around 2004/05. So an eon ago!!

In a corporate sense I was Outlook/Office user from the mid-late nineties, with a few stints in IBM-centric organisations around ‘99/2000 using Lotus then back to Outlook.

In reply to a post by gary333:

Where I work they have integrated Yammer in to the Teams main menu. This was to try and get people to use Yammer as almost everyone likes Teams, but most hate Yammer (apart from the show off type crowd).

We had Yammer first and had a local group for our store, but a few weeks after launching Teams for us, they realised that people were using the Yammer group and not using Teams, so they closed down the one on Yammer. Yammer is integrated into teams for other groups in the company, the things is the amount of people posting in Teams compared to those that posted in Yammer is very small.

i don't know why, since all they had to do was get rid of the yammer app and install the Teams one, maybe people don't like the idea of chat part of teams and having notifications all the time ands yes I know that can be switch off.

Teams has its place even in a single office location. Got to be going on 20 years ago the when the company started using Lotus Notes Sametime (or something similar sounding), and this was a call centre so they certainly had a lot of phones, but many still preferred to get a quick response by this over email or phone call, or heaven forbid getting off their seats.

I am not in an office, it is a supermarket, I am not sat in one place I move around.

I think the whole idea of teams was to try and get people away from WhatsApp for company stuff,, since WhatsApp have it problems with privacy, but then I don't think Teams is much better.

I really thought they would have given up by now, since very few people use it and gone back to Yammer or if they were going to use Teams, they would have rolled it out to more areas.
My department manager is trying always to get people to use it, while she may have had some success in getting a few more people to install it on their phones, they are not using it, so no point really.

I think sometimes Tech don't always make things better, there really is no need for teams in my job, it doesn't make any difference to my job at all.