How to Keep Teams Active on a Mac: What Works and What Does Not

To keep Microsoft Teams active on a Mac, you need two things: the Mac must not lock or sleep, and it must see some keyboard or mouse input at least every few minutes. Teams on a Mac switches you to Away after about 5 minutes with no input anywhere on the Mac, at once when the screen locks, and to Offline when the Mac sleeps. Apps that only keep the Mac awake, such as Amphetamine or the built-in caffeinate, fix the lock but not the idle timer, so Teams still turns yellow. A jiggler app such as Jiggler, a one-line cliclick loop in Terminal, or a USB mouse jiggler creates input and keeps Teams Available.

If you also use Slack, it works differently: Slack counts only input inside the Slack window, so none of these keep it green unless Slack has focus. Slack Green keeps your Slack status active from the cloud during the working hours you set, with nothing running on the Mac. For both apps at once, see keep Teams and Slack active at the same time.

Why Teams goes Away on a Mac

Microsoft Learn, User presence in Teams, sets the rules for every computer: presence "becomes Away automatically if they're inactive for a few minutes or if the computer is locked; and it becomes Offline when the computer enters sleep mode". Teams reads the Mac's system idle time, so typing in a browser or scrolling a PDF keeps you green. Only no input at all starts the timer. The timing, measured, is in how long before Teams shows you as Away.

That gives two separate jobs on a Mac:

• Stop the lock and sleep. Otherwise Teams goes Away or Offline the moment the Mac locks or sleeps.
• Create input. Otherwise Teams goes Away after about 5 minutes, even with the screen on.

What keeps Teams green on a Mac, compared



Method	Stops lock and sleep	Keeps Teams Available	Cost
Lock Screen settings set to Never	Yes	No, the idle timer still runs	Free, built in
caffeinate or Amphetamine	Yes	No, sends no input	Free
Jiggler app	Yes	Yes	Free
cliclick loop in Terminal	With caffeinate	Yes	Free, Homebrew
USB mouse jiggler	Yes	Yes	About $15 to $35
Busy or Do not disturb with a duration	No	Shows red, not green	Free, in Teams

We tested the keep-awake apps against Slack in does Amphetamine keep Slack active; the same missing-input problem is why they do not keep Teams green.

Option 1: Jiggler, a free Mac app

Jiggler moves the pointer a pixel when the Mac has been idle for a set time, and also keeps the Mac awake.

Install it with Homebrew, or download it from sticksoftware.com:

brew install --cask jiggler

Open System Settings, Privacy & Security, Accessibility, and turn Jiggler on. Without it, macOS blocks the pointer movement.

In Jiggler's settings, set it to jiggle only when the Mac is idle, with a delay under 5 minutes, for example 2 minutes. That way it stays out of your way while you work and fires before Teams reaches Away.

Leave the Mac for 10 minutes, then check your status from Teams on your phone.

Other apps and a USB jiggler are compared in mouse jiggler for Mac.

Option 2: a one-line script to keep Teams active on a Mac

No app install beyond cliclick. This moves the pointer one pixel right and back every 60 seconds, and caffeinate -d -i keeps the display on and the Mac awake while it runs:

brew install cliclick
caffeinate -d -i sh -c 'while true; do cliclick m:+1,+0 m:-1,+0; sleep 60; done'

Press Ctrl+C to stop. The first run asks you to allow Terminal (or iTerm) in Accessibility. To stop it on its own at the end of the day, put the end time in the loop. This one stops after 8 hours (28,800 seconds). caffeinate -t does not work here: its man page says the timeout is not used when caffeinate runs a command.

caffeinate -d -i sh -c 'end=$(( $(date +%s) + 28800 )); while [ "$(date +%s)" -lt "$end" ]; do cliclick m:+1,+0 m:-1,+0; sleep 60; done'

Avoid scripts that press F15 on a Mac, which work well on Windows: on some Apple keyboards F14 and F15 change the screen brightness. The Windows version is in PowerShell script to keep Teams active.

Option 3: settings in Teams itself

Teams has no setting that holds you at Available, and admins cannot change the timeout. What you can do in Teams:

• Set Busy or Do not disturb with a duration. Select your profile picture, your status, Duration. Microsoft says a manual Busy or Do not disturb without a duration lasts 1 day. You show red instead of yellow, which reads as "working" to most coworkers. The trade-offs are in how to look busy on Teams.

• Keep Teams open on your phone. With the Teams app on screen, your phone reports you as Available, and the most recently active device wins. It turns Away as soon as the app goes to the background; see does Teams stay green on mobile.

Teams shows Away on a Mac while you are working

If you get the yellow clock while typing in other apps, check:

• Hot Corners. In System Settings, Desktop & Dock, Hot Corners, a corner set to Lock Screen or Start Screen Saver locks the Mac when the pointer touches it, which sets Away.

• Lock Screen settings. A short Start Screen Saver when inactive or Turn display off time locks the Mac during a long read. The settings are explained in keep a Mac screen from locking.

• A second device. Teams on another computer or a browser tab can report Away if it was the last one you used.

• An old Teams app. Update to the new Teams for Mac from the Teams menu, sign out, and sign back in. The screen saver on its own is covered in how to turn off the screen saver on a Mac.

More causes, with fixes, are in Teams status stuck on Away.

Can your company see it?

Teams shows only the status. It does not report that a jiggler is running. But a company Mac is often managed: IT can see installed apps like Jiggler and running processes like cliclick, and some monitoring tools flag input that software generated. If a managed Mac greys out the Lock Screen settings, that is a policy, and working around it can break your company's rules. What Teams reports to admins is in does Microsoft Teams track your activity.

Quick answers

Does Amphetamine keep Teams active? It keeps the Mac awake, so Teams does not go Offline. It sends no input, so Teams still goes Away after about 5 minutes.

Does caffeinate keep Teams green? Not by itself, for the same reason. Pair it with an input source, as in the script above.

Does closing the MacBook lid set Teams to Away? It sets Offline, because the Mac sleeps, unless you run it with an external display and keyboard. See keep a laptop awake with the lid closed.

How do I keep Teams active on a MacBook without installing anything? Keep the Teams app open on your phone's screen, or set Busy with a duration. Nothing built into macOS creates input for you.