“The Green Dot” — Online Status Does Not Tell You Who Is Available

Anna looks at the team list in the company messenger. Olek’s status has been grey for forty minutes.

— Olek, are you there? You’ve been offline for forty minutes — Anna writes.

Olek has closed the messenger so he can focus on finding a difficult bug.

— During working hours I need to know you’re available — Anna says later.
— I closed the messenger precisely so I could do my work.

For Anna, visibility is a signal of work. For Olek, temporary invisibility is sometimes a condition for work.

What really happened

Anna treats status in the messenger as a simple availability signal: green means “working and reachable,” while the absence of green can begin to look like reduced presence or engagement. Olek uses the same tool differently. When he needs sustained concentration, he closes the messenger or notifications precisely so that he can do work that requires focus. The result is a conflict between the visibility of work and the work itself. Anna’s preference for control, measurable signals, and punctuality makes her interpretation plausible. Olek values autonomy and can be easily pulled between stimuli, so cutting notifications may protect his concentration. Neither profile proves the mechanism; they simply help explain why the same dot carries different meanings for the two people.

What the research says

Research on digital work shows that a strong perceived need to respond quickly to messages can itself become a strain — workplace telepressure (Barber & Santuzzi, 2015). In a field experiment with 247 employees, reducing automatic notifications lowered interruptions, reduced strain, and improved task performance (Ohly & Bastin, 2023). This does not prove that someone marked offline works better, or that messengers are always disruptive. It does show that constant reachability and productivity are different things. Research on new ways of working also describes how visibility can gain importance when managers no longer directly observe the work process (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2021). A green dot is therefore an easy indicator, but a weak substitute for actual output.

How to handle it

Teams should define response time and focus time separately. For example: urgent matters use one designated channel; normal messages do not require immediate answers; and a two-hour “do not disturb” block is a legitimate part of the working day. If Anna needs to know whether Olek is available to a client, she should measure that specific need — response time during agreed coverage hours or clear on-call staffing — rather than the color of an icon. The general rule is: do not turn a presence signal into a performance judgment; define the result you actually need first, then choose an indicator that measures it.

How Empatyzer and Em can help

Empatyzer is not a green-dot monitoring system and should not infer engagement from online status. What it can do is show Anna and Olek that they differ in their needs for visible availability, control, autonomy, and uninterrupted focus. Before the conversation, Em can help Anna turn the anxiety of “I can’t see him online” into an operational rule: when must a response be immediate, when can it wait, and how do people signal a focus block? Olek then gets not “freedom from contact” but clear boundaries within which he can work in his own way. If the mismatch appears across the team, aggregated data can support a shared norm instead of individual status interpretation. Micro-lessons reinforce that messenger visibility measures availability to communicate, not the value or quantity of the work being done.