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Microsoft Teams: 75 million daily users
Photo: Debarchan Chatterjee / DPA
The home office is booming in the corona crisis.
Microsoft also benefits from this.
The group dominates the German market with its office software.
The number of daily users of the communication software teams alone doubled to around 75 million last year.
But with a new function of the Office package, which has been called Microsoft 365 for some time, the US group has received severe criticism from unions and data protection agencies in this country: the software can record when and how often employees use the office software.
Superiors should be able to read from a so-called productivity value how intensively their employees use the office software.
The statistics tool shows, among other things, when and how many e-mails the employees sent on which days of the past month with Outlook and how long and often they talked or chatted with each other via teams.
As reported by »Heise«, among other things, employees can also be listed by name.
This evaluation by name is also the standard setting.
An anonymization of the data is possible, but must be activated consciously.
Christian Velten, lawyer and expert in labor law and data protection, considers this option to be legally questionable.
"That doesn't work at all with small teams, for example," says the lawyer.
"If in a group of three employees one is sick and one is on vacation, then you pretty much know who is meant."
Criticism from trade unionists and lawyers
In an explanatory video, Microsoft employees rave about how helpful the tool is to pick out employees who rely particularly heavily on digital communication.
Such employees should accompany less active employees on the path to digitization.
What is not mentioned in the clip: The tool can also list those employees who rarely send messages, communicate little via teams and thus, according to Microsoft, inhibit productivity.
Lawyers urgently advise against using this form of productivity control in Germany.
In an interview with SPIEGEL, lawyer Velten said: "Under no circumstances should bosses use the statistics to evaluate employees." That would be disproportionate surveillance that violates data protection law.
Above all, the detailed evaluation of the tool is "quite problematic."
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He sees the problem in the fact that companies hardly have a choice to rely on offline alternatives.
"Many companies can no longer work without an office," says Velten.
Older Office versions are not an option because there will soon no longer be any support.
“Sooner or later Microsoft will force companies into the cloud.” In his opinion, the only chance is that IT blocks access to productivity data.
Otherwise there is a high penalty.
The Ver.di trade union points out that the use of tools such as office statistics must be discussed with the works council.
In practice, the union often experiences that "employers like to use technical monitoring tools to look for reasons for sanctions against employees," says a spokesman.
In addition, it is at least questionable whether this tool "can even make a statement about productivity." The number of processed e-mails provides "in our opinion no nearly reliable measurement of actual productivity."
Data protection activists hold companies accountable
The authority of the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BFDI) is reluctant to comment on the new office function.
At the request of SPIEGEL, a spokesman announced that Microsoft had not yet checked the Microsoft tool.
The responsibility lies with the employers "only to use programs that are legally permitted".
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When asked, a spokeswoman for the authority added that the mere possibility of monitoring employees does not make the use inadmissible.
In terms of data protection law, it becomes "problematic if the system is actually to be used for behavior and performance monitoring".
According to Section 26 of the Federal Data Protection Act, personal data may only be processed if this is necessary for the implementation of the employment relationship.
The authority does not see it as necessary to collect the date and time in order to understand when employees have sent an e-mail.
However, this must be checked in each individual case, says the spokeswoman.
"The BFDI considers the interference with the personal rights of the employees connected with an unprovoked monitoring of the employees to be inadmissible."
Microsoft: "Not a monitoring tool"
Microsoft obviously considers such allegations to be unfounded.
In a blog post, the company writes: "The productivity value is not a monitoring tool." It is about "discovering new ways of working and offering employees great collaboration and technology experience."
A Microsoft spokeswoman told SPIEGEL that the function was an »opt-in experience« in order to »provide IT administrators with an insight into technology and infrastructure«.
The tools are designed to help companies "get the most out of their technology investments by tackling classic problem areas such as loading times, inefficiently used shared documents and poor network connections."
You feel you are committed to the privacy of users, the statistics tool complies with data protection laws and rules, says the spokeswoman.
"The productivity value does not provide an evaluation for individual employees." The data would be collected for 28 days and then deleted.
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