Does Microsoft Teams Track Your Activity? What Admins Can See

Microsoft Teams tracks activity in two ways. Admins can open the Teams user activity report, which Microsoft Learn describes: per person, it counts channel posts and replies, chat messages, meetings organized and joined, 1:1 calls, audio, video and screen share time, and the last date you did anything in Teams. Your status, meanwhile, uses keyboard and mouse activity on the whole computer: Teams shows Away after 5 minutes without input or when you lock the computer. Teams keeps no report of how long you were Away or sat Available without input; that record exists only if an app or monitoring tool polls your status. Teams does not log what you type in other apps, record your screen outside meetings you share, or list the websites you visit. Monitoring software your company installs is a separate thing and can collect more.

If you use Slack too, its desktop app also follows input anywhere on the computer, with a 10-minute timer (Slack desktop 4.52.178 code, checked 7 Oct 2026).

What the Teams user activity report shows

These are counts over a period, not a timeline of your day. Microsoft notes that admins can show the report with real names or make user names anonymous.

Does Teams track activity outside of Teams?

For your status, yes, in a limited way: the desktop app reads whether the computer has keyboard or mouse input, in any app, to decide Available or Away. Microsoft's support page says Teams sets you to Away when you lock the computer or it enters idle or sleep. It does not record which apps you used or what you did in them. Timings are in how long before Teams shows you as Away. Teams keeps no history of that status; can you see Teams status history explains what admins can and cannot pull.

Does Teams track mouse activity?

Only as "was there input recently" for your status. It does not record mouse movement, clicks or position. We read the Teams web client on 28 October 2026 (teams.microsoft.com/v2, no sign-in needed), and these are the lines that decide your status, printed by a short Python script:

[idle timer] _machineIdleThresholdMs=3e5 (5 min), _machineIdlePollingIntervalMs=2e4 (system idle time read every 20 s)
[presence query the client sends for other people]
  presences {id,availability,activity,isOutOfOffice,lastSeenAt}
[Last seen strings] 'Last seen {{lastSeenTime}}' | '%d %u ago' | 'Just now' | 'Yesterday'

Every 20 seconds Teams asks the computer how long it has been since the last keyboard or mouse input, and after 5 minutes it marks you idle. It reads a number of seconds from the system, not where the mouse went. The presence data Teams sends about you to coworkers has five fields: id, availability, activity, isOutOfOffice and lastSeenAt. None of them is a log of how long you were away. A mouse jiggler therefore keeps Teams Available, which is also why monitoring software, not Teams, is how jigglers get caught; see can a mouse jiggler be detected.

Does Teams track activity on your phone?

On mobile, Teams shows Away whenever the app is in the background and Offline after 24 hours of inactivity. Your phone activity counts in the same usage reports as desktop activity.

Can my employer see what I do on Teams?

• • Your status, live, like everyone else.
• • Activity counts in the user activity report.
• • Message content, through Microsoft Purview compliance tools such as eDiscovery, if your organization uses them. That includes deleted and edited messages under a retention policy, as shown in can my employer see deleted Teams messages. That works like Slack exports; compare can Slack be used to monitor employees.
• • Everything else only if your company installs separate monitoring software on your device.
• • Your work location, office, building or remote, if you set it or your company turns on workplace check-in. See does Teams show your location.

Copilot chats are stored the same way: Microsoft keeps your Microsoft 365 Copilot prompts and replies with your other work content, where admins can search them. For ChatGPT and Claude, see can my employer see my ChatGPT history.

Calls are a separate question: Teams keeps call history and can record, but it has no silent listen-in on normal calls. The details are in can my employer listen to my Teams calls.

FAQ

Does Microsoft Teams track your activity?

It counts messages, meetings and calls for admin reports, and uses computer-wide input for your status. It does not log keystrokes or screens.

Can Teams see what I am doing on my computer?

No. It only knows whether there was recent keyboard or mouse input.

Does Teams tell my boss when I am away?

Your boss sees your status like anyone else. There is no separate away report in the user activity report.

Can my manager see how long I was in a meeting?

Admins see audio, video and screen share time totals in the activity report.

Does Teams track activity like Slack?

Much the same. Teams and the Slack desktop app both use input anywhere on the computer; Teams waits 5 minutes, Slack 10.