Amazon has taken 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 just whether employees come to the office, but how long they stay there.
The new system, which began rolling out in December, gives managers and HR teams visibility into employee office attendance, daily time spent on site, and the specific buildings where staff badge in, according to an internal document reviewed by Business Insider. The dashboard refreshes daily and analyses data over a rolling eight-week period.
The move marks an escalation in how the company monitors compliance with its five-day, in-office mandate for most corporate employees—one of the strictest return-to-office policies among large technology firms. Amazon introduced the mandate last year as part of a broader push to restore in-person collaboration.
The dashboard categorises employees into three groups: “Low-Time Badgers”, whose median office time falls below four hours per 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 assigned location.
“These metrics are intended to surface employees operating significantly outside documented in-office expectations,” the internal document said.
Amazon said the updated tool is designed to standardise information already available to some managers. “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,” an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider. “We recently updated the dashboard to make it more consistent for all managers, but we haven’t changed our expectations.”
Managers are expected to apply discretion when using the data and deciding whether follow-up or formal action is required, the company said.
Amazon began tracking individual office attendance in 2023, reversing an earlier practice of collecting only anonymised, aggregated data. In 2024, it also moved to curb so-called “coffee badging”, requiring employees to spend a minimum number of hours in the office for attendance to count.
The dashboard applies across Amazon’s corporate workforce, excluding warehouse staff and contractors, and gives managers direct access to information that previously had to be requested from HR, according to people familiar with the matter.
Amazon is not alone in tightening oversight of hybrid and remote work. Reuters has reported that companies including Dell, JPMorgan, Bank of America and PwC have increased monitoring of office attendance and signalled that non-compliance could affect performance reviews or compensation.
For Amazon, the dashboard underscores a broader shift: return-to-office policies are moving from cultural expectations to measurable, enforceable systems, raising fresh questions about workplace trust, employee autonomy and the long-term shape of hybrid work.