Amazon Tracks Office Hours with New Manager Dashboard

Amazon has deployed a new internal dashboard to monitor corporate employees' physical presence in the workplace. The tool provides managers with detailed metrics on how often staff badge into offices and the duration of their stays. This development represents a significant escalation in the company's efforts to enforce its return-to-office (RTO) policy, which currently mandates five days of in-office work per week for most employees.

The system automatically flags specific categories of employees who deviate from attendance expectations. These include Zero Badgers who fail to badge into any building, and Low-Time Badgers who spend fewer than four hours per day in the office on average. The dashboard, which began rolling out in December, aims to standardize attendance tracking across Amazon's corporate workforce.

Amazon is equipping its managers with powerful new metrics to monitor their reports. The dashboard tracks not only whether employees show up to the office but also how many hours they spend there. This move marks an escalation in the surveillance of white-collar workers at the e-commerce and cloud computing giant.

The updated dashboard allows managers and HR to view how often employees come into an office, how long they stay, and the locations where they work. It refreshes at 5 p.m. PT daily and tracks these metrics over a rolling eight-week period.

The system flags three kinds of employees based on their badging data:

• Low-Time Badgers: Employees whose weekly median time in the office is less than four hours per day, averaged over a rolling eight-week period.
• Zero Badgers: Employees who do not badge into any Amazon building during that span.
• Unassigned Building Badgers: Employees who badge into a building other than the one they are assigned to over half the time.

According to the internal document, "These metrics are intended to surface employees operating significantly outside documented in-office expectations." The dashboard standardizes these metrics across Amazon's entire corporate workforce, excluding workers such as warehouse staff and contractors. It grants managers direct, on-demand access to data that they would have previously had to request from HR.

The introduction of this dashboard follows a series of increasingly strict measures by Amazon to enforce attendance. Last year, the company implemented one of the industry's most stringent RTO mandates, requiring most employees to work from an office for five days a week. Managers now have a way to spot and potentially confront employees who fall short of these expectations.

Amazon notes in the document that managers are expected to "apply judgment" when determining whether to initiate formal disciplinary follow-ups. The company has a history of tracking attendance data; in 2023, Amazon began tracking and sharing individual office attendance records, reversing a previous policy that only tracked anonymized, aggregated data.

A year later, the company began cracking down on "coffee badging"—a practice where employees briefly stop by the office to swipe a badge and then leave. The company informed some teams that they needed to be in the office for a minimum of two to six hours to have their attendance count. This crackdown received criticism from some employees, with one comparing the move to being treated "like high school students."

Despite the new surveillance capabilities, Amazon maintains that the goal is collaboration. A company spokesperson stated, "For more than a year now, we've provided tools like this for managers to help identify who on their team may need support in working from the office each day." They added, "We recently updated the dashboard to make it more consistent for all managers, but most of the data and functionality was previously available."

Amazon is hardly alone in using badge data to police return-to-office rules. Many corporations are adopting similar technologies to monitor employee presence and enforce hybrid work policies.

Other companies utilizing similar tracking methods include:

• Samsung: Rolled out a manager-facing tool showing "days and time in building" metrics to discourage "lunch/coffee badging."
• Dell: Informed hybrid staff that it will track on-site presence via badge swipes and could factor attendance into performance and compensation.
• Bank of America: Issued warning notices to employees, informing some that continued noncompliance with its RTO policy could result in further disciplinary action.
• JPMorgan: Employees have described an internal dashboard that calculates the share of eligible days spent in the office and is visible to senior managers.
• PwC (UK): Stated it would track employees' work locations to enforce its RTO policy.

As companies continue to navigate the post-pandemic work landscape, the use of data analytics to enforce office attendance appears to be a growing standard in the corporate world.