Should Amazon Be Cracking Down on ‘Coffee Badgers’?

Amazon has instituted new return-to-office policies to reduce “coffee badging,” or the practice of hybrid employees coming into the office building to badge in and grab their morning coffee before going home to work for the remainder of the day.

According to leaked Slack messages attained by Business Insider, retail, cloud computing, and other Amazon teams were recently told that a minimum of two hours per visit is required to count as office attendance. Some department teams are being required to stay six hours.

The moves come as many Amazon workers had already protested the company’s move in May 2023 to require office attendance for most corporate staffers three times a week after allowing remote work when the pandemic arrived.

“Over a year ago we asked employees to start coming into the office three or more days per week because we believe it would yield the best long-term results for our customers, business, and culture. And it has,” Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told Entrepreneur in an emailed statement. “Now that it’s been more than a year, we’re starting to speak directly with employees who haven’t regularly been spending meaningful amounts of time in the office to ensure they understand the importance of spending quality time with their colleagues.”

Roughly 30,000 Amazon employees had signed a petition against mandated office attendance last March, but Amazon quickly rejected the effort. By the fall, Amazon began telling employees that not showing up three days a week could lead to being fired or losing a chance at a promotion.

The leaked Slack messages, according to Business Insider, showed that many workers see the hourly mandates to be “unreasonably stringent” with some questioning their legality. One worker suggested people will naturally rebel “if you treat employees like high school students.”

Others sought more data on why such policies were beneficial. One employee wrote on Slack, “Remember when we were measured on metrics that actually mattered?”

Amazon is not alone in seeking to track workers’ office attendance, with reports arriving in fall 2022 that corporations were shifting back to encouraging in-person work. A Wall Street Journal article last fall indicated that Facebook-parent Meta Platforms, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and TikTok-parent ByteDance were among those requiring workers to document their whereabouts and employing technologies to monitor their attendance.

The WSJ stated, “Companies generally have wide legal latitude to monitor workers, and some are turning to more granular sources of data such as IP address information transmitted via Wi-Fi, ceiling-mounted heat sensors and weight-triggered sensors attached to chairs that can track workplace occupancy levels.”

A recent survey by LinkedIn News showed that 19% of workers are still coffee badging, with another 31% having done so in the past.

The jury still seems to be out on whether fully remote, hybrid, or fully on-site corporate workforces are optimal. According to Owl Labs’ State of Hybrid Work 2023, 60% of hybrid workers think they’re more productive when they work from home, while 30% believe they’re at the same level of productivity working from home. Among hybrid workers surveyed, 38% said an office setting is best for meeting new people, while 30% said it is best for meetings, and another 28% said they prefer an office setting when collaborating with others.

According to the Flex Index, launched by work management startup Scoop, the activities that attracted employees the most to the office were teamwork (32.4%) socializing (27.5%), and managing/mentoring (9.5%). Ranking lower were creativity (6.4%), team meetings (5.7%), knowledge (5.7%), client meetings (4.6%), and productivity (4%).