Multinational tech behemoth Amazon continues to push its three day a week, return-to-office mandate. And its latest attempt involves monitoring its hybrid workers’ in-office hours in an attempt to cut down on the practice of coffee badging.
For the uninitiated, coffee badging is when hybrid employees swipe into work just long enough to meet their company’s RTO requirements – anything between 2 to 6 hours a day in Amazon’s case – and quickly leave to spend the bulk of their workday remotely.
The post-pandemic landscape has seen a number of corporations desperate for its workforce to get back in the office, and Amazon has been keen to lead the charge for its employees.
Amazon Targets “Coffee Badging” in Ongoing RTO Push
Last year saw Amazon inform its corporate employees that they’d need to return to the office three days out of the week – although they declined to set any minimum hours. That left a lot of room for interpretation, and certain employees began quickly dropping in to grab a coffee, show their face, and so satisfy that requirement.
As Business Insider reports, Amazon has now begun monitoring the amount of time employees spend in the office in a move to “crack down on people who are trying to skirt the company’s return-to-office policy.”
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The amount of time required to meet that RTO requirement, however, has differed across departments. For example, the retail and cloud-computing teams are required to clock-in for a minimum of two hours, while others were told to be on site for six hours – almost an entire workday.
The War Between WFH and RTO
With remote working proven to be a productive – and for many, very desirable – option, a significant proportion of employees don’t want to be shuttered back into the corporate environment.
Since 2023, Amazon has tried various methods to coerce their employees back on site. This approach has included giving managers the right to terminate employees who refused to return and making full-time employees working from home ineligible for promotion.
As a result, Amazon has faced resistance following its stipulation last year that employees commit to three days on site. Since then, it’s been reported that 30,000 people have signed an internal petition to oppose the move.
Yet not everyone is down on Amazon’s mandate. Company spokesperson Margaret Callahan reports that asking employees back to work has greatly benefited the work culture, customers, and the company.
“The vast majority of employees are in the office more frequently, there’s more energy, connection, and collaboration, and we’re hearing that from employees and the businesses that surround our offices.” – Margaret Callahan, spokesperson for Amazon
Why the Resistance to RTO?
Amazon isn’t the only company in an ongoing power struggle over its employees’ working habits. Only last month, we reported on a leaked memo from Dell, who, like Amazon, informed their staff that they’d forgo career advancement if they didn’t haul ass back to the office.
Yet the threat of being held back by their employer, or losing their jobs even, didn’t seem a sufficient deterrent. Almost 50% of Dell staff chose to stay working remotely, according to internal data on the entire full-time workforce that Business Insider obtained. Meanwhile, a recent study suggested that two-fifths of European jobseekers would forgo an attractive offer if it didn’t come with an element of remote or hybrid working.
According to a survey by eLearning company Skillshub, almost half said they’d consider quitting their jobs if they had to return to the office. Why the pushback? 19.7% of respondents concurred that the work environment caused anxiety and stress. Another 19.5% believed it negatively impacted their diet, while 17.4% reported that it was detrimental to their work-life balance.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. There were a greater number of people who thought the office milieu could positively improve well-being — 31.1% of those surveyed. Given that everyone thrives under different conditions, surely an individual approach to working patterns provides the optimal way to keep employee morale and productivity high?
