- Amazon has mandated office work five days a week and is changing the way it tracks badge data.
- Employees have logged into an internal Slack channel to discuss how it will work.
- The new system offers more flexibility and no longer tracks time in the office closely.
Amazon’s strict new RTO policy comes with changes to how the company tracks office attendance, according to internal messages seen 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 noncompliant and how to deal with those situations, the messages show.
Amazon tracks when employees use their internal ID, or badge, to enter an office. Last summer, she began monitoring hourly attendance to crack down on “coffee tags,” when staff come in briefly just to log a day at the office.
Until recently, the company’s tracking system also applied labels to employees, such as “volatile badger” and “zero badger”, depending on how they complied with the RTO’s previous three-day mandate.
Now, according to internal messages, those labels are gone, and managers get raw badge data and have more discretion over how to interpret the information and what action to take with employees, internal messages suggest.
An Amazon spokesperson said the tool “gives employees and managers visibility into the days they entered 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, managers put together the 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 exactly how it would work.
“In general, badge reports provide visibility into the days you’ve entered 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 you have logged, including logged sick days and vacation.”
Employees have taken to an internal Slack channel to discuss how token tracking will work under the RTO’s new five-day mandate, according to recent messages viewed by BI.
Instead of “inconsistent badger” or “zero badger” designations, managers can now see “raw data about days they’ve logged or taken paid time off,” explained a manager on Slack.
Another Amazon manager said what’s visible now is a “pretty simple table view.” Managers can view the badge report at any time, and it refreshes daily at 5pm PST, according to Slack messages.
Days, not hours
Locations are not tracked, at least in a way that is visible to managers. The new tool doesn’t record how long someone was in the office, or track when they came and left. Instead, the new system focuses primarily on counting the number of days staff are logged in.
If employees fail to meet the five-day wait, the internal system directs managers to talk to them.
“The missing piece here is that there’s nothing telling managers what to do with this data other than talk to the employee to understand,” an Amazon manager wrote in a recent Slack message. “I think the answer will be ‘work with your manager,’ and your manager will have to work with HR to get clarity on a case-by-case basis.”
One manager warned that Amazon’s HR department or company executives may have another mechanism that tracks more detailed attendance information.
“It is not clear what additional monitoring they will do, but I suspect they will not make it visible to us,” this manager wrote. “More than likely it will be obvious to HR and HR will reach out to ask what’s going on with an employee who isn’t hitting five days a week.”
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