• Amazon mandated office work five days a week and is changing how it tracks badge data.
• Employees have taken to an internal Slack channel to cobble together how it will work.
• The new system provides more flexibility and no longer tracks time in the office as closely.

Amazon's strict new RTO policy comes with changes to how the company tracks office attendance, according to internal messages viewed by Business Insider.

The new approach provides managers with less granular data on office attendance and appears to give managers more freedom to decide which employees are not complying and how to deal with these situations, the messages show.

Amazon tracks when employees use their internal ID, or badge, to gain access to an office. This past summer, it started monitoring attendance by the hour to crack down on "coffee badging," when staff pop in briefly just to log a day in the office.

Until recently, the company's tracking system also applied labels to employees, such as "inconsistent badger" and "zero badger," depending on how they complied with the previous three-day return-to-office mandate.

Now, according to internal messages, those designations are gone. And managers get raw badging data and have more discretion over how to interpret the information and what action to take with employees, the internal messages suggest.

An Amazon spokesperson said the tool "gives employees and managers visibility into the days they badged into a building."

"The information helps guide conversations between employees and managers, as needed, about coming into the office with their colleagues," the spokesperson added.

Employees and managers cobble together details

When Amazon announced plans to require employees to work in offices five days a week, it said in an internal FAQ document that the company would continue to collect badge data, but it was unclear how exactly that would work.

"In general, badge reports provide visibility of the days you badged into an Amazon building," the guide said. "This includes nearly all corporate buildings, data centers, fulfillment centers, and delivery stations. The badge reporting system will also reflect any PTO which you've recorded, including recorded sick days and leaves of absence."

Employees have taken to an internal Slack channel to cobble together how badge tracking will work under the new five-day RTO mandate, according to the recent messages viewed by BI.

In place of the "inconsistent badger" or "zero badger" designations, managers can now see "raw data about which days they've badge in or taken paid time off," one manager said on Slack.

Another Amazon manager said what's visible now is a "pretty basic table view." Managers can see the badging report at all times, and it refreshes daily at 5 p.m. PT, according to the Slack messages.

Days, not hours

Locations aren't tracked, at least in a way that's visible to managers. The new tool doesn't record how many hours someone was in the office or track when they came and left. Instead, the new system mostly focuses on counting the number of days staff come in.

If employees fail to meet the five-day expectation, the internal system instructs managers to have a conversation with them.

"The missing piece here is there is nothing that tells managers what to do with this data other than to talk to the employee to understand," one Amazon manager wrote in a recent Slack message. "I think the answer is going to be 'work with your manager,' and your manager is going to have to work with HR to get clarity on a case-by-case basis."

One manager said Amazon's human-resources department or company leaders may have another mechanism that tracks more detailed attendance information.

"It's not clear what additional monitoring they will be doing but I suspect they will not make that visible to us," this manager wrote. "More likely it will be visible to HR and HR will reach out to ask what's up with an employee who isn't hitting five days a week."

Are you a tech-industry employee or someone else with insight to share?

Contact Ashley Stewart via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email ([email protected]). Use a nonwork device.

Email Jyoti Mann at [email protected] or DM her via X @jyoti_mann1.