How to keep Teams active and your status green

When Teams switches you to Away

On a computer, Teams turns you Away when you’ve been “inactive for a few minutes” or the computer locks, and Offline when it goes to sleep. Microsoft doesn’t say how many minutes a few is. The five minutes everyone quotes comes from users. On a phone, you’re Away whenever the Teams app is in the background, and Offline after 24 hours without use.

How to keep Teams status green

Microsoft’s own fix lives in Teams on the web. Open Settings, then Notifications and activity, then Presence, and turn on “Keep my current status when I’m active outside of Teams on the web”. Your browser then asks for permission to detect activity in other tabs and apps. Allow it, and work in your other windows keeps you green.

What you can’t do is pin yourself to Available. Teams only lets you pick a status less available than the one it works out for you, so once it has you as Away, Available isn’t on the menu.

Setting Busy for focus time

Green isn’t always the goal. For a stretch of quiet work, set yourself to Busy or Do not disturb by hand. With no duration picked it holds for a day, so clear it when you’re done. The hard part is the first message that arrives anyway. Answer it, and the red dot stops meaning anything.

How to keep Teams active on a laptop

Locking the screen makes you Away and sleep makes you Offline, so your laptop’s lock and sleep timers decide how long you stay green.

With Teams on your phone as well, the device you touched last sets your status. Read one message on the phone, put it back in your pocket, and you show as Away until you touch the laptop again. On the phone itself, longer sleep or idle settings buy some time before Teams switches you to Away.

Out of Office status

Turn on an Outlook auto-reply, one of our funny out of office messages included, and Teams sets you to Out of Office by itself. A calendar event marked Out of Office does the same. Open Teams from the beach and your usual status shows next to the Out of Office marker, so colleagues can see you’re away and online at once.

What your employer can see

The Teams user activity report in the Microsoft 365 admin center counts, per person, chat messages, channel posts and replies, meetings organized and attended, and calls. It adds time on audio, video and screen sharing, and the date you were last active. It covers 7, 30, 90 or 180 days, with names shown or hidden. Time spent Away isn’t on its list.

Other tools see more. 31% of the UK managers whose organization monitors staff online say it watches chat apps such as Teams, Google Chat and Slack. At UnitedHealthcare, social workers were marked idle while they talked to patients, because talking to a patient isn’t typing. Only 19% of US workers say their company uses no tracking software.

A green dot records that something moved. It can’t tell a busy person from a jiggler, or from a contractor whose project ended while the status carried on. A fake work screen changes what’s on the monitor and nothing about the dot, since it never presses a key for you.

Mouse jigglers

A mouse jiggler is a gadget or an app that nudges the pointer, so the computer never counts as idle. 31% of US workers have moved their mouse to stay online in Teams or Slack, and among millennials it’s 38%. At UnitedHealth, one employee’s manager told her to jiggle her mouse during meetings so she’d look active, which makes it the rare trick with a manager’s approval.

The gadgets differ in what they leave behind. The kind the mouse sits on, powered from a wall socket, never touches the laptop. A USB jiggler is an unknown device on a company machine, and a work laptop can keep a record of those. Put the wall kind on a plug timer set for the end of the day, and the dot turns yellow when everyone else’s does. A dot that stays green until midnight is the one somebody asks about.

Simulated keyboard activity is what got more than a dozen Wells Fargo staff fired in 2024. It puts a jiggler at the risky end of any list on how to look busy at work.