The thing I like most about Microsoft Teams is when I turn it off and can finally get some peace. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with it at work, but most of my current coworkers have learned not to abuse it. We stick to email for anything important, and Teams is only for "fun," which can be annoying, but is really all Teams is good for. Again, for socializing it's fine if counterintuitive, but for business, it's causes too many distractions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Teams has become a bigger part of life since I started working from home, but it can be so annoying and invasive that it ultimately defeats its supposed purpose. Everyone in my department of about 30 people is on it and I get notified whenever any of them post. Even if I want to say hello, I'm stuck in that thread, and will continue to receive messages unrelated to my actual job, which requires concentration and speed. We primarily use Teams for "fun" but when I'm editing and writing a clinical response letter, these mindless conversations start to drive me crazy. More annoyingly, it's used as a way to monitor employees. A lot of managers realized we didn't really need them once we started working from home, so they decided to micromanage on Teams. They changed the time our status changed from available to away from 10 minutes to 5, and my last employer wanted us to drop a message if we were going to the bathroom. I'm a middle-aged man, and I'll go to the bathroom whenever I feel like it. At that job, we claimed jobs via teams, and one of our seven managers wanted us to pretend to try to grab a job that was already claimed just to show that we were always there, trapped staring into a computer even when there were almost no jobs on the board, and when we stopped getting work, Teams was used as part of the metric to determine our raises and performance. You can't meet your quotas if the work isn't there, but instead of just being honest with us, they blamed us for being lazy, or not being team players. If they had just stopped constantly henpecking me and told the truth that they couldn't give us decent raises because a lot of our clients had gone out of business, I might have stayed. The place I'm at now is slightly better. My primary manager had my job in the past and understands you can't do work if there just isn't any to do, and that taking breaks is absolutely necessary when ploughing through this dense, repetitive garbage. Words start to lose meaning and you start to go blind unless you get up and walk away for a few minutes. Overall, I'd say Teams works for socialization, but isn't good in a business setting, and that things that should be simple like adding a person to a conversation are counterintuitive and/or change so often you never get a chance to get used to it. It can also be wonky, as it sometimes fills the screen for no reason and freezes my computer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
