--- title: "What your manager knows vs what your manager can observe" date: 2026-08-02T00:00:00Z updated: 2026-07-30T09:40:02Z tags: ["Microsoft 365", "Copilot", "Microsoft Teams", "Governance", "Workplace Surveillance"] canonical: https://bianca.codes/blog/what-your-manager-knows-vs-what-your-manager-can-observe/ --- # What your manager knows vs what your manager can observe _Two default-on Microsoft features shipped in June to help someone else watch how you work, not help you get more of it done. The difference between them matters._ June was a busy shipping month for Microsoft, and two of the things it shipped have nothing to do with you getting work done. They are about someone else seeing how you do it. One is a Viva Insights dashboard that tells your manager how much Copilot your team is burning through. The other is a Teams feature that quietly notes when you are in the office, based on which Wi-Fi network your laptop joined. Neither was announced as surveillance. Both are on by default. And the difference between them is the whole point of this post, because it is the difference between a manager who knows something and a manager who can watch something, and those are not the same problem. ## Knowing and observing are different problems A manager who _knows_ something has been handed a fact. Discrete, dated, sitting in a report someone built on purpose. You can see the fact too. You can argue with it. A manager who can _observe_ something has an ongoing signal. It runs in the background, it updates itself, and the interpretation happens inside their head where you cannot audit it. Nobody built a report. There is nothing to argue with, because there is no artefact, just an impression forming over weeks. Microsoft shipped one of each in June. It is worth taking them separately, because the right reaction to each is different. ## What your manager now knows On 30 June, Viva Insights added Copilot credit usage insights, sometimes labelled AI spend, as a dashboard and inside Advanced Insights. It shows how many Copilot Credits a team is consuming across services, including Cowork and the WorkIQ API. It is enabled by default, no action required, and the scoped view is available to managers with at least five direct reports, alongside Insights analysts and Global admins. On its own, a cost dashboard is reasonable. If your organisation is paying per task for agentic Copilot, someone has to watch the meter, and it is better that the watching is structured than that it happens through a panicked email when the bill lands. Here is the part that is not just a cost dashboard. The standard Copilot Dashboard aggregates its data to a minimum group size, so a manager cannot infer any one person's behaviour from a team number. Cost insights are explicitly exempt from that minimum group size. Microsoft made a deliberate choice that spend data does not get the same aggregation floor as everything else. Think about what that does in a team of five where one person is the obvious heavy user. The number stops being "the team's spend" and starts being "mostly one person's spend, visible to their manager, by default." Combine it with the fact that Microsoft spent June auto-installing the Copilot app on eligible devices and tightening the licence so the useful in-app features need the paid SKU, and you get a complete arc. Push the tool onto every desktop. Charge for the good parts. Then ship the manager a dashboard of who is using what you made them pay for. That is a _known_ thing, though. It has a shape. You can see the same dashboard your manager sees, you can ask how the number is being read, and an admin can switch manager access off in Viva Insights settings. It is the better of the two problems. ## What your manager can now observe The Teams feature is the one that should make you sit up, precisely because it has no shape. Workplace Check-in, rolling out to general availability in June, has Teams for desktop periodically scan for Wi-Fi networks and compare them against a list of office networks your IT team configured. Match one, and Teams marks you as In office. Leave the building, and your location flips to Remote. You do not press anything. You do not confirm anything. Your presence is inferred from your network connection, continuously, in the background. It is enabled at the tenant level by an administrator. Microsoft's position is that this is an in-the-moment signal, not stored as historical movement data, and that it does not override your own choice to set your workplace location. The reporting around the launch is less tidy: whether an individual employee can permanently opt out, as opposed to their whole tenant having it switched on over them, is the part Microsoft has not cleanly answered. When the sources contradict each other on whether you can turn it off for yourself, that is not a detail. That is the detail. And even taking the "we don't store history" assurance at face value, it misses where the risk actually lives. The risk was never Microsoft building a movement database. It is your manager glancing at a presence dot during a return-to-office push and forming a view about who is "really" committed, on evidence you never see and cannot correct. The assurance is about data retention. The problem is human interpretation, and that is not something a retention policy governs. This is the affectionate-critic bit: Microsoft genuinely did add better privacy controls this time around, and it genuinely still does not fix the thing that makes people uneasy. ## The default flipped, and that is the real story Take one step back from the two features. The thing they have in common is more important than either. Both are on by default. Both are switched at the tenant or admin level. Neither asked the person being measured for anything. The Viva dashboard assumes managers should see spend unless an admin intervenes. The Teams check-in assumes your presence should be broadcast unless someone turns it off. In both cases, the resting state is observation, and privacy is the thing you have to actively configure your way back to. That is a change worth naming, because it quietly moves the work. Not long ago, watching how someone worked was a decision a manager had to make and, ideally, justify. Now the watching is the factory setting, and the effort has moved to the person who wants it _off_. In most organisations that person is a single overworked M365 admin who has forty other default-on changes to review this month and no particular reason to prioritise these two. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### **Can I turn off the Viva Copilot spend dashboard for myself?** Not as an individual. Manager access to the cost insights is controlled by an administrator in Viva Insights settings. If it worries you, the move is to ask whoever owns your Viva configuration to disable manager access to cost insights, not to look for a personal toggle, because there is not one. ### **Does the Viva cost dashboard show my individual Copilot usage?** It shows team-scoped spend to managers with at least five direct reports. But because cost insights are exempt from the minimum group-size aggregation that protects other Viva metrics, a team number can effectively point at an individual when usage is lopsided. It is not a per-person report by name, but it is not as anonymised as the rest of the dashboard either. ### **Can my employer see my location when I work from home with Workplace Check-in?** The feature keys off your device joining a recognised office Wi-Fi network. Off that network, Teams marks you as Remote rather than pinpointing where you are. It reports in-office versus not, not your home address. The concern is less about location precision and more about how an in-office-or-not signal gets read during return-to-office enforcement. ### **Is Microsoft storing a history of when I'm in the office?** Microsoft states the workplace location is a current, in-the-moment signal and is not retained as historical movement data. Take that as given and the exposure still exists in real time, through a manager watching the live signal, which no retention policy addresses. ### **Are these features unique to Microsoft?** No, and that is rather the point. Presence and usage telemetry are becoming a default posture across workplace platforms, not a Microsoft quirk. Microsoft is just the one that ships to a few hundred million desks at once, so when its defaults change, the norm changes with them. ### **How do I find out if my organisation has these switched on?** Ask your M365 or Viva administrator directly about two things: manager access to Copilot cost insights in Viva Insights, and the Workplace Check-in policy in the Teams admin centre. If you administer the tenant yourself, both are worth a deliberate decision rather than inheriting the default. ## The way to think about it Do not file these as two more features to have an opinion about. File them as a shift in the default. When you evaluate any new workplace capability from here, the useful question is not "what does this let me do." It is "what does this let someone observe about the people who did not choose it, and who has to act to switch that off." If the answer is that observation is the resting state and opting out is a task nobody is assigned, you already know how it plays out in practice, regardless of what the privacy FAQ promises. Knowing is a problem you can manage. Observing is a posture, and posture is much harder to argue with once it has quietly become the default.