I'm so glad my company a) has a "nobody wants teams" stance and even recommends against it to our clients, and b) doesn't give a fuck if I go idle for hours because they hired me to do a job and if it's getting done they're happy.

Micromanaging culture needs to die. Fire employees who don't do the job and be done with it.

I have teams open all day at my PC and on my work phone because that's how I get contacted to fix things. Annoyingly domain accounts no longer log us into teams so I have to reauthentice it 3 times a week. Worse still is every few months they'll reset the settings to default so that if I have teams open on my PC all notifications play there. My PC is always muted and I rely on my phone for notifications because I'm usually walking around the building and remoting back to the cube. So I'll go through days where I'm pissed off because I'm not getting notifications only to remember to go check the settings on the PC to find out yup its set to only play notifications there.

With all these "IT can see when you connect a USB device" comments, I must ask has anyone ever actually worked for an IT department that made you micromanage/snitch on people like that? It all sounds like a bunch of hypothetical scare mongering to me. Granted, I've never been company IT for a fortune 500, but I've been outsourced IT for dozens and dozens of other companies all across the spectrum, and the notion that we were monitoring USB devices connected to each workstation is laughable. We monitor for the presence of malicious files, files with names like passwords.txt, and suspicious logins to your account. That's pretty much it. People change mice all the time. I've used an arduino-based jiggler on my own work PC.

Furthermore, and this is the more important detail for myself, I've known many many different IT people working at every level and I don't think I've ever met a single one who gives half a shit if employees aren't being productive. Just don't break your computer please, and if you do, for the love of God don't try to fix it yourself. Personally, I've never seen any instance of any worker ever trying to circumvent arbitrary productivity metrics with easy workarounds because I'm not a fucking snitch. In IT, we also have bullshit "productivity" targets that are completely decoupled from actual productivity. We get that it's bullshit. If there's an IT department out there that's full of snitches trying to catch workers slacking, that sounds like a genuinely awful place to work.

your job sucks

Your not working if it takes u more than 2 minutes to any thing

Mouse Jiggler with Adjustable Timer

It's simple enough to just make one too.

warm and moist…

just put a spoon on your trackpad

It also eats up to 1,5gb of ram sitting idle as a chat program. So yeah it's not running unless I need it and then it gets to shut down again. Luckily we don't use it as our primary chat tool.

FTTY

I have Java on my machine. So I wrote a small program that moves the mouse one pixel every minute. Forever green.

Set up a solo meeting with yourself. During meeting it doesn't change the status at all, so after you join that solo meeting in the morning set yourself to available and you will be available whole day.

I'm going to give you a mega useful tip.

You need to create a group. You can kick the user later and say it was an accident. Then you start a meet inside of that group. You can be the only one in the call. Change your status from Busy to available again on top. Just leave yourself muted inside of that Teams call. Your Teams will never go inactive and neither will your laptop.

I'm so glad we use Matrix at work. Our IT department even tells us explicitly not to use Teams if we can avoid it.

If you join a meeting with yourself only, you can manually set your status to available and it will never go to away.

My boss loves sending me messages saying "Are you working today?" within 3 minutes of being idle on teams at any point in the day.

Other times if i'm idle he'll call me just to give me some busy work or try and "catch me" not paying attention or something.

In the office I can be idle on teams for hours at a time and there's never, ever random spot checks for productivity... and we have no objectives, goals or project management (because he doesn't think any PM principles are effective.)

I learned from my wife that you can start a meeting by yourself using the Meet Now button on the Teams calendar, and that will keep you flagged as Busy.

I run teams in a PWA on Linux which doesn't have permission to check if I'm using my computer or not so I'm always listed as away unless I'm interacting with Teams directly. I hate teams so much.

Use a program called Caffeine. It presses F15 every 59 seconds. Nice thing is that F15 is a largely unused button, so it doesn't interfere in any way when you're actually doing something on the computer (classic mouse wigglers are very annoying in that regard)