Amazon has provided its managers with a new dashboard designed to monitor employee office attendance. The system tracks metrics such as the duration employees spend in the office and their presence, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.
This initiative follows Amazon's implementation of a return-to-office (RTO) mandate last year, which requires most employees to work from an office five days a week. The dashboard aims to identify employees who may not be meeting these office attendance expectations.
The updated dashboard, which began rolling out in December, allows managers and HR personnel to view employee office attendance frequency, duration, and work locations. Data refreshes daily at 5 p.m. PT and covers a rolling eight-week period.
The system categorizes employees into three groups based on their office presence:
- Low-Time Badgers: Employees with a weekly median office time of less than four hours per day, averaged over an eight-week period.
- Zero Badgers: Employees who do not badge into any Amazon building during the eight-week span.
- Unassigned Building Badgers: Employees who badge into a building other than their assigned one for over half of their office visits.
According to an internal document, these metrics are intended to highlight employees operating significantly outside documented in-office expectations. An Amazon spokesperson stated that the company has provided similar tools for over a year and recently updated the dashboard for consistency, while maintaining existing expectations for office presence. Managers are instructed to apply judgment before initiating formal disciplinary follow-ups.
In 2023, Amazon began tracking and sharing individual office attendance records, a shift from its previous policy of only tracking anonymized, aggregated attendance data. The company later addressed "coffee badging" by informing some teams that a minimum of two to six hours in the office was required for attendance to count.
This dashboard standardizes attendance metrics across Amazon's corporate workforce, excluding specific roles such as warehouse staff and contractors. It grants managers direct, on-demand access to data that previously required requests from HR. Amazon states the dashboard is intended to promote meaningful in-person team collaboration.
Other companies have also implemented similar attendance tracking measures. Samsung uses a manager-facing tool that shows "days and time in building" metrics. Dell tracks on-site presence via badge swipes, which can factor into performance and compensation. Bank of America has issued warning notices to employees regarding RTO non-compliance. JPMorgan utilizes an internal dashboard that calculates the share of eligible days spent in the office, visible to senior managers. PwC in the UK tracks employees' work locations to enforce its RTO policy.