Amazon tightens in-office mandate oversight with new monitoring tool

Amazon has adopted a more formal and data-driven approach to enforcing its return-to-office policy by rolling out a centralised, manager-facing dashboard that tracks not only whether employees attend the office but also how long they remain on site, according to a report by Business Insider.

The new system, which began rolling out in December, provides managers and human resources teams with visibility into employee office attendance, daily time spent in offices and the specific buildings where staff badge in. An internal document reviewed by Business Insider stated that the dashboard refreshes daily and analyses data across a rolling eight-week period.

The move marks a further tightening of enforcement of Amazon’s five-day, in-office mandate for most corporate employees, one of the strictest return-to-office policies among large technology companies. The mandate was introduced last year as part of the company’s broader effort to restore in-person collaboration.

According to the internal document, the dashboard categorises employees into three groups. These include “Low-Time Badgers”, whose median office presence is under four hours a day; “Zero Badgers”, who have not entered any Amazon office during the tracking period; and “Unassigned Building Badgers”, who regularly badge into offices other than their designated location. The document stated that these metrics are intended to surface employees operating significantly outside documented in-office expectations.

Amazon informed Business Insider that the updated tool is designed to standardise information that had already been available to some managers. The company said it has provided such tools for more than a year to help managers identify team members who may need support in working from the office each day, and added that while the dashboard has been updated to ensure consistency, expectations around in-office attendance have not changed.

The company further stated that managers are expected to exercise discretion when using the data and when deciding whether follow-up discussions or formal action are necessary.

Amazon began tracking individual office attendance in 2023, reversing its earlier practice of collecting only anonymised and aggregated data. In 2024, it also moved to curb so-called coffee badging by requiring employees to spend a minimum number of hours in the office for their attendance to count.

The dashboard applies across Amazon’s corporate workforce, excluding warehouse employees and contractors, and gives managers direct access to information that previously had to be requested through human resources, according to people familiar with the matter cited in the report.

Amazon is not alone in tightening oversight of hybrid and remote work. Reuters has reported that companies such as Dell, JPMorgan, Bank of America and PwC have also increased monitoring of office attendance and signalled that failure to comply could affect performance reviews or compensation.