Amazon’s New Office-Tracking Tool Brings RTO Compliance Under the Microscope
Amazon’s new dashboard tracks badge swipes and office hours, raising fresh questions about privacy, culture, and the future of workplace monitoring.
Amazon has quietly rolled out a powerful new internal tool that allows managers to see exactly how often employees are coming into the office — and how long they are staying. According to internal documents accessed by Business Insider, the system uses employee badge data to create a detailed, near-real-time picture of office attendance, reinforcing the company’s strict return-to-office (RTO) push.
The dashboard, which began reaching teams in December, is designed for managers and HR leaders. It shows how frequently employees swipe their badges at Amazon offices, how many hours they spend inside, and whether they are showing up at the location officially assigned to them. The data refreshes every day and is analysed over a rolling eight-week period, meaning patterns of low attendance are hard to hide.
This marks a shift from Amazon’s earlier approach, where office attendance was mostly tracked through aggregated or HR-mediated reports. With the new tool, managers can see individual-level data instantly, giving them far more visibility — and control — over how their teams are meeting in-office expectations.
The move builds on Amazon’s tough stance on office work. Last year, the company introduced one of the tech industry’s strictest RTO policies, requiring most corporate employees to be in the office five days a week. As hybrid and remote work became more common across Silicon Valley, Amazon went the other way, insisting that in-person work was central to its culture and productivity.
Inside the new system, employees are grouped into categories that leave little room for interpretation. Workers who spend less than four hours a day in the office on average are labelled “Low-Time Badgers.” Those who have not entered an Amazon building at all during the eight-week window are called “Zero Badgers.” There is also a separate group for people who regularly badge into offices other than the one they are officially assigned.
“These metrics are intended to surface employees operating significantly outside documented in-office expectations,” the document states.
Amazon has emphasised that the dashboard should not be used in a rigid or automatic way. Managers are encouraged to apply discretion before taking any formal steps. Responding to queries, an Amazon spokesperson said, “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.” The spokesperson added that the system has been updated to ensure consistency across teams and that Amazon’s expectations around office attendance have not changed.
The company has been steadily tightening the screws on attendance. In 2023, it stopped reporting office presence only in anonymous form and began sharing individual-level data with leaders. A year later, Amazon began targeting what employees informally call “coffee badging” — briefly showing up just to log attendance. Some teams were told that spending two to six hours in the office was required for a day to count.
Not everyone has welcomed this approach. Some employees have criticised it, with one earlier report quoting a worker who said the system made them feel “like high school students.”
The new dashboard now standardises attendance tracking across Amazon’s corporate workforce, though warehouse workers and contractors are not included. Managers no longer need to request reports from HR; the data is available to them directly, making monitoring faster and more comprehensive.
Amazon says the intention is not surveillance for its own sake, but to promote stronger in-person collaboration. “Working In-office is important to our culture and is also about more than just being physically present during the week," the document says.
Amazon is far from alone. Other major employers, including Samsung, Dell, JPMorgan, Bank of America and PwC, have also introduced tighter attendance-tracking systems as they push staff back into offices, signalling that workplace monitoring is becoming a defining feature of corporate life in 2026.
