I guess I'm more surprised that these were anonymous at some point. That seems like a pretty normal thing to track when you pay employees hourly. Were they in the building when they claimed to be working?
Like I realize this is charged up by the work from home discussion, but I'd expect any building with a badge to get in the door to be tracking those events, at the very least to detect unauthorized access, but also to detect folks claiming to be working when they're not even there. Basic fraud prevention stuff really.
> to detect folks claiming to be working when they're not even there
I think it's outrageous to look at it this way. Tracking for security, safety, or insurance purposes—sure. Maybe even to make it easier to post your hours.
Tracking to detect who is working and how many bathroom breaks they take—that's not the way to go. We're humans right? Surely there are ways to detect when someone doesn't fulfil a task they were supposed to.
Yeah I agree it is quite invasive, and humans aren't machines. I have a coworker going through colon cancer and has to use a colostomy bag which takes time to deal with.
...Amazon would just fire him for wasting time in the bathroom. Still a great worker, just needs more time than the average. What a great future we are working towards.
Okay, but that is after-the-fact. He has to stress about it now and then file a lawsuit while unemployed and dealing with cancer. I mean, even if he wins... that supposes that he lives long enough to win the suit. So "should" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
I understand the stress, having been through it myself. I think that employees should have greater rights than they currently do, but that will take another generation of voters that didn't grow up with the veneration of business imbued by Ronald Reagan etc.
In my particular case, I've made extensive use of the ADA to make sure that I don't have to deal with any BS about bathroom breaks etc. Of course I work in IT so I'm pretty privileged compared to a guy slaving away in an Amazon warehouse.
All true, and very well said. Having a disability, temporary or otherwise, is in itself a burden most people don't have to carry. Having to worry that it could get you fired feels awful, and it's something you think about most of the time.
If you're someone who needs the protections of the ADA, you should make sure your HR team knows what accommodations you need.
I have a disability that isn't obvious, and have to routinely make sure that my leaders are aware of the accommodations I need. I've had HR actively take action on my behalf when certain middle managers didn't know, or care, to support those accommodations. In one incident, they fired a manager over their lack of support.
While I hate that I need to do it, it tends to be worth it to make sure your company knows what you need.
I'd also like to think that, should I ever get fired because HR didn't manage to intervene in a similar situation as described, the dispute would be more likely to go my way. It at least removes the ability for the company to say "we didn't know about the disability."
Can we stop acting like it isn't trivial to get around these laws if you're not stupid about it? The US has at-will employment, which means that you just come up with another excuse to fire someone without being stupid enough to explicitly state it's related to their disability.
I'm very aware of how companies can try to discriminate against employees who are disabled. If Amazon tries to fire this guy for not meeting his "quota," then they also need to demonstrate that they've made reasonable accommodations. They also need to carefully document his performance issues. Juries are very amenable to a plaintiff suing for unfair dismissal.
Yes, this requires having enough money to hire a good lawyer, or finding one either working pro bono or willing to work on a contingency basis. Or finding an agency like the EEOC etc which will help with this.
The alternative is to just say "too bad" and let companies get away with this shit.
No, that's not the only alternative. Where did you come by this defeatist perspective? Another alternative is union representation to confront the firing before it happens.
Sure, unions are another solution, but let's be clear:
A union only works if you were part of the union before you were fired unjustly.
Without that, "too bad" is indeed often the best you can do.
I was once in the hospital with acute pancreatitis. It was unplanned, and would have killed me had I not made it to the ER. The company I was working for at the time "let me go" because I'd gone two days without showing up to work. Given that during those two days I was unconscious and nearly dead, that would have been impossible to do.
When I spoke to a lawyer, they were very clear that the company had broken the law (FMLA protects people in situations like mine), but that fighting it would cost me a lot of money, and that there was no guarantee I'd win. I fought them anyways. I spent months fighting them, and spent thousands of dollars. The company ended up receiving a fine for less that what I paid in lawyer fees, and that's it. No payout for me, no resolution. The state felt the case was at least strong enough to justify the fine, but not strong enough to justify anything else.
So, yeah, sometimes "too bad" is about all we get.
I agree with unionization, but I was discussing the current status quo for the majority of workers in the US. Hopefully unions will both grow in number and be strengthened.
Oh, I see. I misunderstood. Perhaps the fault lies with my ideological bent, or with the English language.
When you said "The alternative is to just say 'too bad' and let companies get away with this shit" there were no pronouns or whatever indicating the subject of the verbs "say" and "let". I assumed the subject of the sentence was a broad "we, as a society, over the next several decades", whereas I'm now realizing you meant "one, as an individual caught in this particularly tragic moment."
> Tracking to detect who is working and how many bathroom breaks they take—that's not the way to go.
Given the way Amazon treats their warehouse workers, I'm more surprised folks don't already assume they Big Brother their office workers in a similar way.
One of those classes is more equal than the other, though I assure you that when Bezos stares down at them all from space, he does not see them any differently.
I didn't get the impression these were hourly employees, or that this was restricted to hourly employees.
It seems to be less about "How many hours were you in the building?" than "Which days did you come to the building?" which tracks compliance with an RTO mandate that even affects salaried employees.
Salaried employees are typically expected to work 5 days a week, hours not tracked. But tracking attendance and the designated work venue seems very fair to me.
It's normal for a badge-checking system, but it's still an erosion of white-collar norms (autonomy being the key one) to be so proscriptive about how knowledge workers complete their work.
Side note, but when I worked somewhere with badged entrances, one person would badge the whole group. So this data wouldn't mean employees aren't there if there is no swipe.
You aren't supposed to do that anyway. It seems far fetched, but someone might have been terminated without you knowing and is trying to sneak back in. At a larger enough company, this is bound to occur
We're supposed to do individual scans. If I walk through a door that someone is holding for me I can my badge and make a quip about Big Brother. A lot of people don't scan in these situations and I think that's a mistake. Our employer is absolutely tracking badge scans against employees who are supposed to be RTO.
I've been in the tech industry since 1995, and I've never worked somewhere that didn't require individual security badges to gain access to the building. Both schemes exist in abundance.
Some of the FANG certainly do, using one at a time admission enforcement devices in some (but not necessarily all) of their core offices. Amazon, Meta for sure.
30 years ago, a friend of mine worked at a Wall Street bank in NYC. They had a policy that you could take a car service (paid by the company) home if you worked in the office until 9PM. He used to badge out at around 6PM, go to dinner/drinks at a nearby restaurant, then badge back in a 9PM and order a car. :-) This behavior was noticed by the badge police and we was soon looking for a new job. :-)
I didn’t think anyone wanted to open that Pandora’s box with respect to hourly workers lest people start suing for unpaid work using badge in time as evidence. As long as they don’t track it too closely they have a lot more plausible deniability for wage theft. Once they start tracking it, the lawyers can start manipulating juries.
As it's often said, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you're going to watch closely people on the hours done, also make sure to pay them properly for any excess hours. Wage theft is the worst kind of theft.
This data is not typically provided to line managers, and is usually only used in extreme cases by HR. The news is your boss is now basic time clocking salaried employees.
That’s not new either, but it is pretty new for professionals in software. It’s also historically not how salaried employment worked. Salaried employment meant you’re paid a salary and you get your job done or lose your job. No one is tracking your time in any way, and you are afforded a certain amount of trust. Your performance is based on your output as judged by your managers. Paid time off accounting scuttled this for salaried people, but this is a next level of bean counting for salaried professionals.
The badging data absolutely existed before now - but who had access to it, who was looking at it, and what was the criteria used to determine days in office?
Answers to those questions have changed over the last 6 months.
I know that my employer (big company everyone here knows) is tracking badge scans as part of RTO compliance. I've had conversations with my manager about it because I'm supposed to be in 3 days per week but typically only make it 2 due to a physical therapy appointment. It's no problem, since I've worked it out with my manager, but I do wonder if I'll get swooped up in some dragnet and be forced to explain myself, or worse.
> That seems like a pretty normal thing to track when you pay employees hourly.
We need eye trackers and brain implants to make sure the workers aren't looking at something else or thinking about non work related tasks too. I don't want to pay these parasites a single cent for idle time /s
> "We're providing this data to help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues," said the memo, obtained by Insider.
The HR-speak / corp-speak really rubbers the wrong nerve with me, most probably because at $DAYJOB this started to be more and more a things in the last 18 months. I understand that an official company statement has to use a certain tone and wording but constructs like "help guide conversations" just means "your boss will scold you for this in your next 1:1".
This probably means it's high-time for me to go back to a smaller place.
My theory is that they need attrition, and they need managers to be managing out employees at a higher rate than they’ve historically been comfortable. So they won’t typically fire someone directly for attendance (yet) but they will give the managers permission to do so. That’s what these memos are meant to convey.
Maybe we’ll see something similar from other big tech cos in the near future, since they all use the same consulting firms for these decisions.
The reality is they need office attendance to meet tax agreements with the cities they’re located in. All the “culture” hand waving is certainly a factor, but something so fuzzy wouldn’t fly at Amazon. It’s when data is presented that decisions get made typically, and they have no data that shows in office collaboration improves productivity - quite the opposite - I’ve seen the data collected by other megacorps I’ve worked at where we had these discussions. The only real data is the many millions they’re getting in tax agreements with seattle and other cities they’re located in.
Attrition is probably also a part of it. However, I’ve heard there’s a strongly negative bias working again Amazon in that attrition where only top talent is attriting and they’re loading up on bottom quartile who are coming into the office every day to try to cling to their job.
> The reality is they need office attendance to meet tax agreements with the cities they’re located in.
I don’t disagree, but that doesn’t explain these actions right? Amazon would be free to have a policy which was not enforced by badge tracking — leaving things up to managers and establishing a culture norm of in-office work with flexibility was pretty much standard pre-COVID. Surely the city isn’t asking for attendance records.
I guess it’s likely a confluence of factors (tax breaks, monetary incentives, old-guard management, real-estate portfolio losses, resentment toward engineers they perceive to be lazy) pointing in the same direction.
Salaries, total compensation, total net employment costs, tax credits, and special deals on electricity negotiated directly with utilities are tightly held secrets.
No, instead they sound gaslighty, dishonest, and manipulative. Is that less damaging to morale? Perhaps their employees are gullible or desperate enough to take these saccharine euphemisms at face value.
In our entitled and highly litigious society I call this Corporate Normal Form.
First Corporate Normal Form is messaging derogatories, or things perceived as such, to have a unoffensive coating and makes speaking about them not immediately trigger your fight or flight response.
On a related note, George Carlin has a funny skit about how messaging has gotten softer over the years that you might enjoy.
My high school used to track attendance on if we showed up every day or not. Was I supposed think this was odd?
People can debate endlessly over the benefits, or not, of working in an office but it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a company to want its workers to show up at an office and reasonable to measure if they actually do. This is a non story.
> People can debate endlessly over the benefits, or not, of working in an office but it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a company to want its workers to show up at an office and reasonable to measure if they actually do. This is a non story.
Germany disagrees with you. This kind of employee surveillance is illegal.
Please elaborate. According to a verdict of the Federal Court for Labor from last month [1], not only is tracking an employee's presence legal, it's even mandatory as a necessary consequence of European Court of Justice verdicts. Whereas in Germany before, a trust-based system was common practice at least for white collar jobs, and only the time on top of regular contract time needed tracking AIU.
Amazon has offices in Germany, and the comment I was responding to called this kind of surveillance “perfectly reasonable” as if this were a globally uncontroversial policy. It’s not.
Guess folk in Germany finds it way more reasonable if this surveillance is carried out by a flesh-and-blood manager? :) I don't really see how it changes anything of substance, except of being formally non-compliant.
After four years of filling out attendance sheets with hours per every day worked (this is in Germany btw) with monthly reminder from the manager about it I beg to differ. Even though the job (academic research) doesn't have a strong correlation between output and hours spent on site
Germany is irrelevant to the story at hand, but I find it extremely rich how since Covid many younger workers now feel entitled to a paycheck and full-time employment benefits even if they refuse to show up at work as requested or actually get any productive work done, whether in-person or remote.
Workers who have entered the workforce in the last few years, especially technology workers, seem to have a sense of entitlement and privilege previously unheard of.
I hate to break it to those of you in this camp, but life is hard. You have to go to work to make money and build a career for yourself. Your manager will probably ask you to come into the office at a location that is inconvenient for you and involves hours of weekly commuting time, and you'll have to decide whether you'll sacrifice your commute time for a paycheck and a chance at building your future career.
When we eventually get a recession (it will inevitably happen, sooner or later) these workers are going to have the rudest awakening ever when they discover that yes, you actually do have to work for money, and no, your manager is not required to pay you or keep you employed if you directly disobey an order like "please come into the office 3 days a week."
Man, these kids today, huh? Expecting to be able to use PERSONAL computers instead of punch cards. They're lucky they have computers at all. If their managers tell 'em to use slide rules, they should feel privileged, I tell you what. And can you believe that they're not wearing ties five days a week? What kind of wusses are employees today with these polo shirts? Next thing you know, they'll be expecting to own their own automobiles and to have electric lights, refrigeration and air conditioning!
Goddamn, can you BELIEVE that expectations change over time? What kind of bullshit is that?
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I won't bother to add the sarcasm tag for the humor impaired here, but if you don't believe that most remote workers are actually (checks notes) working, the problem is not with the remote workers. Bosses can demand whatever the hell they want, sure. But if it turns out that some bosses don't demand everybody come back to the office and those companies turn out to do just fine, well, that's that vaunted market at work, baby. Expectations really do change, and it is not reasonable to assume that every "knowledge" worker has to be in the office all or even most of the time these days.
> but if you don't believe that most remote workers are actually (checks notes) working
I never said that. I'm talking about a very specific smaller group of workers: those that started their careers between 2020 and 2023 and believe they are entitled to a full-time salary and employment whether they work or not. Reality check incoming...
Doesn't each new generation of the workforce have a sense of entitlement and privilege previously unheard of? Workplace expectations change every decade; just b/c this expectation of working remote is new doesn't mean that it's irrational.
Many tech organizations genuinely do not reap the benefits of working in-office like some other fields might.
If I were an automotive design engineer, being in-person in the company's design studio would make sense; if I'm developing a highly abstracted and distributed messaging system, what office resources would I utilizing?
From my experience, in-office interactions are not necessarily more productive than online interactions. In fact, when a team has a good grasp of the remote-working tools, we, more often than not, end up communicating more succinctly and effectively.
"Life is hard," sure, but no need to make it any harder than it needs to be.
Anyone who has done software engineering on a reasonably sized "2 pizza team" would have to acknowledge that it's easier to do software engineering if you're all co-located at the same physical location in the same timezone several days a week.
The fact that we _can_ get work done remotely doesn't mean it's the most effective way for software engineers (which make up most engineering teams these days) to work.
> life is hard. You have to go to work to make money
That's certainly one approach towards living life.
Another might be:
Don't accept it when your employer decides to start tracking your every move and work for a company that values outcomes more than they do asses-in-chairs. When the eventual recession comes, the odds that it'll disrupt you in any significant way will be greatly reduced because you haven't spent the last three years worried about how to present yourself as "productive", and instead have been focused on actually getting things done.
Another reason to expatriate. The entitlement to demand vassal-like fealty from employees can encroach to become anti-personal growth to the individual. A person is more than their job, and the notion that one’s needs are subservient to career promotion is a limiting belief.
If every person instead operated a bit more like a company, rather than a vassal, they’d be a little more assertive in their negotiating of boundaries.
Right, and I always have the same question to anyone complaining about this.
"If you hire someone to fix the plumbing in your house and you pay him by the hour, would you check that he worked what he's asking or do you pay blindly?"
Yes "Amazon bad" and whatnot but in the end it all boils down to the same thing, we live in a society where you want what you pay for, whether you're an individual or a company.
And as a plumber, if you don't want to be checked or followed by some annoying customer, you ask to be paid for the completed job, not by the hour.
A more relevant discussion for this crowd I think would be, if you hire a consultant and pay them hourly, do you expect to be able to monitor their screen remotely while they work?
Because I’ve been a consultant hired hourly, and I would never agree to that kind of surveillance. If you don’t trust me, don’t hire me.
The output of the work should be all that matters. Back to your point, if the plumber fixed the problem for what seems like a reasonable amount of time, why would I need to follow them around?
Feels like you're moving the goalposts. Article doesn't mention anything about monitoring the screen remotely. You could rephrase it as "if you hire a consultant with the expectation that they will attend in person 3 days a week, do you expect to be able to verify that is happening?"
Exactly, but how can I trust you without knowing you ? Trust but verify right ?
I've also been a consultant and worked in a place where they manage sensitive data.
They told you on day 1 that the computer they provided is monitored for everything and that they can take screenshot from time to time. If you don't agree, you don't work there.
> The output of the work should be all that matters.
Not when you're hired hourly/weekly/monthly, the output is irrelevant.
If a company hire you for your time, it means that your time is at "their" disposal. If they tell you to be at the office during that time, you're supposed to be there.
And if they think that it's best for them to have you sit in a room with 20 other zoom callers for the possibility that you might talk with someone down the hall and that it might raise the revenue, that's their decision.
Work is a business relation between 2 entities with rules in place, if 1 entity doesn't like some rules, the relation stops.
And as they are paying, they have the right to verify that they receive what they're paying for, whatever it is.
Just like it's my decision to accept that I must pay the plumber for his time when I ask him to explain me some stuff about my boiler that I could read online.
That is incorrect. That "key difference" is not even remotely a universal truth.
I've been a consultant and an employee many times in my career. You can take any variation of the following sentence and it'll remain true:
I've worked for a company as a [ hourly consultant | salaried employee | per project consultant ] that [ monitored my every keystroke | monitored attendance | monitored nothing ].
Every variation is possible, and I've seen every variation.
It all depends on the nature of the consultancy agreement. If you work for the financial industry as a consultant you can expect to allow monitoring.
I don't know of a single place that makes the law clear, but if you dig in a bit, you can find a lot of resources that describe the legal differences between contractors and employees. One thing that's evident in nearly anything you can find is that contractors basically have no protections.
The IRS doesn't care in the slightest if an employer monitors a contractor.
I sure as shit talk to them when they get there, then talk again when they are ready to leave, ask them to walk me through what they did, and double check the invoice for accuracy.
Especially for "subscription" services. I've found it's best to trust, but verify that they are coming out as frequently as you're paying them to and doing everything you're paying them for. It's not even a malice thing; humans make mistakes.
I hire you to change the electrical panel and you charge me X to do it, I'll leave you alone and might even leave the house because the electricity is out.
If I pay 150$/h to have something fixed, you can be sure I won't be far.
But if I want to watch them work, I ask first if it's ok for them.
I know this is a heated debate, but from my experience, the situation is way more nuanced.
During the pandemic, we have worked remotely for a year or so, and we were bloody effective. However, when I pondered about why is it so, I found out that because we have deep personal, one to one connections already. In other words, we can work effectively because we know each other very well, not only in work setting but in personal setting too.
When a remote team is assembled, the window for knowing each other is way narrower. You can work and put good results out, yes. We also do this all the time, because we work with many remote teams as a part of the said team, and we don't see them face to face for years sometimes, however when we meet with these people, even for a couple of days, our relationship and work performance changes.
Since we spend time together, we understand each other better and note our underlying characters, inside and outside work. This allows better relationships and faster, way more efficient work. Mails get shorter, things get more fruitful, and work accelerates.
WFH and remote work works, up to a point, but there's a glass ceiling. Some people may not feel or want to understand that, but it's there.
Face to face communication carries way more information than a webcam + microphone.
Valid point. If a manager wants to motivate an employee they have to get to know them, truly care about them. Can't be faked.
A mandatory first month work from the main office, bi annual everyone retreat in one location or twists on these ideas might work for remote only setups.
Total surveillance only works for drones and monkeys hitting typewriters. Totally fine for a cash cow monopoly.
I think you make a great point. I think full remote with maybe quarterly meetups is the best. That way new hires can meet people and relationships can form for the foundation of remote work
> I think full remote with maybe quarterly meetups is the best.
I started working full remote in 2018, and I found quarterly meetups work well. 3 days to 1 week on-site per quarter. I pack the week with in-person meetings/lunches/dinners with my customers, coworkers and management to get facetime.
The thing is, when you start to spend 8 hours a day with the same team, you start to see the other sides of the people. You start to share your life, what happens outside work, and maybe a couple of interests.
This makes the person you're working with more than a drone, because you have the chance to touch to other person's life. The same is also valid for your colleague.
To be able to foster these kinds of relations, you need to share the space for quite some time. Humans are not machines, this is not a file transfer operation This is way working face to face, esp. in a harmonious team is always better than WFH. Companies are not always in the wrong for wanting their teams in the office.
Of course some people may prefer WFH more, for any number of reasons, and I'm no judge. However, claiming that F2F working conditions have no advantages over WFH is just not true, to put it very mildly.
“Effective” is hand waiving. Consider this scenario.
Maybe you have 2 A students (metaphors for workers) and 4 C students remote. The A students are effective regardless of attendance. But the C students actually become B students when attendance is forced.
You might argue C students should be replaced but you might still end up with C students a year later because hiring is hard.
Given this dynamic it’s obvious why one would be motivated to require attendance.
This is just a thought experiment but I think it shows how blame could be pointed at many different places. For example why couldn’t attendance be required only for lower performers? Etc.
You're neglecting the A students being turned into B students, and the B students being turned into C students, and the C students who might've had a chance at improvement but now don't, because the school insisted on packing everyone into the lunchroom and forcing them to do their work elbow-to-elbow with each other.
It’s all reasonable and fine until you ask Legal whether it’s GDPR compliant and part of operational workbook and start mentioning all the other scary things.
Are there countries where the police don't track where you are at all times?
There is a qualitative difference between "could, with a valid reason and manual effort, track" vs. "automatically tracked and shared with your management chain".
Any company with badge readers has an access log. In the before-times, that log would only be used for a legal or HR investigation, after the fact, when there are other performance problems.
This is going to be used to punish employees, semi-automatically, probably even if they are otherwise performing well.
Any source for such a bold claim? Our Betriebsrat is absolutely fine when managers check our attendance by looking at hour booking entries and associated locations.
Hour bookings and locations are dine, as in you saying at which location you clocked in and out. Referencing badging to enter and exit a location to cross-reference clocking in and out data is, usually, a complete no-go. Unless, of course, a specific employee is suspected of cheating.
But then I assume it depends on the BR as well, but each and every BR I encountered so far was strictly oppossed to this kind of data cross referencing. Unless, of course, entering and exiting a location is used for clocking in/out, because then there is no data to cross reference.
I remember when the CEO of a company I worked for stepped down and I encouraged a friend to run for the position saying I'd vote for him. I thought it was amusing, but I've always found it funny that centrally-planned dictatorships are seen as a terrible form of government, but also essentially how every private company is run. (In the US at least - I have a vague notion that workers get seats on company boards in other countries at least.)
While I am sure there was database somewhere with badge-in data, up until now I have never worked at a place that looked at that data or made it available to managers or employees. Exempt status (non-hourly worker) in US essentially prevents company from controlling hours worked for individual employee.
I worked at a company that used badge-in data to determine how many people to expect for lunch (which the company provided). Given the terribly ancient tech that system ran on, I'm certain that around 11AM every day the person responsible for producing lunch would import a CSV file into Excel and tally the list, all in plaintext.
Granted, that's probably an odd exception to the norm, but your comment reminded me of how badge-in data presented a clever solution to a problem, even if I shudder to think of how that data could have been used for harm.
Depends on how you mean 'track'. At our company, of course we always had badges and therefore there's some auditable trail of access somewhere. But it was never a tool that my management chain regularly used to check up on employees outside of an occasional anomaly. It wasn't until a 3-day office mandate that managers started receiving badge-in reports.
At places I’ve worked, they were logged, but only ever audited in cases of suspected time fraud or other legal infractions. Anonymized statistics were also sometimes used for covid tracking. There was never somebody actively sifting through the data and taking attendance.
Maybe? Not my cup of tea, but if I didn't trust my wife, and she allowed me to track her, maybe that'd solve whatever hypothetical problem we were having. Very unlikely, but I don't think the idea itself, doomed to fail or not, is a problem if both parties consent.
Which is what you do when you work for an employer that wants to track your entries/exits into their buildings. You consent to allowing systems to be put in place that serve as placeholders for when trust isn't yet or won't be established.
I would assume that most companies are not large enough to need badges, but also that the smaller number of large companies have a higher percentage that do.
If you have to badge in it’s tracked somewhere. If they generate reports or even access the data is another story. The buildings access control system knows what badge ids opened the door or gate.
Saying someone is "tracking attendance" doesn't mean "there is hypothetical data out there that could be used to track attendance." It means they are generating those reports and using them. The "another story" is the entire story.
People in this thread seem to be focusing on whether or not a company can track attendance; of course it can, that's not the story. The more interesting thing about this story is that Amazon said it would only track aggregate, anonymized statistics, but it has been revealed (in a shocking twist) that they were lying to their employees and the public about it.
Interesting thread for me, since usually it's the US that has practices that are a pain in the butt for employees.
Well, this time it's apparently the other way around.
In my country (Slovakia, EU member) it's standard for corporate jobs to track fixed salary employees via badge readers. I've never worked such a job and always thought it's weird but the practice is ubiquitous.
Depending on the management, in some (most?) companies you get into problems if you spend far less than 8 hrs a day average in the offices. Only now, with remote work, I think the practice is slowly going away.
I think the expectations are different for salaried workers in the US and (most?) EU countries. In the EU, salaried workers are usually contractually required to work a certain amount of time, unlike the US where it is more "do the work asked of you". If you have finished your task faster than expected, then you're supposed to get a new task and work on it until you've worked the contracted hours. Conversely, if you've done your hours, then see you tomorrow.
In that regard, it makes more sense to track how much time you actually work since it is a breach of contract not to work them.
Anecdotal, but I've found from multiple jobs that the quality of the working environment seems to be inversely proportional to how strictly time is tracked. I worked for a tech company that had us clocking in and out (even for restroom breaks) like fast food workers, and by coincidence it was by far the worst job I've ever had.
I think when a company trusts its employees to get the job done, a few really good things happen. High performers (where "performance" is directly tied to revenue, or goal completion, or actual metrics and not "ass-in-chair" fluff) produce quality work quickly. Middle performers do fine. Terrible performers, if you have any, stick out - instead of having a hard conversation with them about how many hours they put in, you can have a hard conversation with them about how they need to improve.
What I think is fascinating is how frequently, when working in an environment that gives someone room to be creative, or less stressed, or even given more responsibilities, middle performers often become high level performers. I'm sure there are lots of reasons as to why, but I've seen it happen a lot. I suspect that when you trust someone to do what they're good at, they have room to get even better at it. At least that's been my experience.
I have also seen insanely pedantic levels of tracking and reporting and dogma at companies, and those are miserable places. High performers leave. Everyone else spends their time figuring out how to juice their numbers and play within the system so they look like high performers. Tracking everything builds a new, unspoken system that, when you're in it, becomes your first concern above all else, and even pits you against your coworkers.
I've worked 3 professional jobs where I was salaried and still had to check-in/out, one was due to the security need to know exactly who was in the building at any one time, the other two were overzealous micromanagers.
Assuming the employee is performing his duties and producing the expected output, and not sharing confidential company info, then how is this a problem? CEOs lead multiple companies, and often sit on the boards of other companies, and it's OK. Retail workers can work two or three jobs to hustle and make more money and that's admirable, but somehow when a white collar office worker manages to do it successfully, it's a huge problem?
In my cases, the employees weren't performing the expected output, which is what led to the discovery that they were working multiple jobs. Retail workers aren't working multiple jobs at the same time. In general, it is a straightforward transactional relationship with hours worked. That's not the case with a salaried job.
Seems like basic management to me, if I was operating a company of Amazon's size I would 100% want to have some form of attendance tracking, hourly or not.
Sure, but "were they in the office" is /much/ easier to measure at scale. And I'm sure you'd throw a pretty big fit if your pay was docked because the company didn't think you did a good enough job, even though you were in the office.
Alas, “this metric doesn’t track what we care about, BUT it’s easier to collect, so let’s use it” explains a lot of really bad policies and practices in our world.
You "just" need thousands of employees to do additional labor. And then you need to process all of that data, including adjusting for the variability in how supervisors measure performance.
They're not mutually exclusive, tracking attendance doesn't mean you are forced to ignore work quality.
Also outside of 80s cop dramas the line "but dammit I get results" does not overrule all other employer concerns. If instead of disregarding an attendance requirement an employee instead decided to disregard a safety requirement, would you give them a pass because they got the job done? How about if they mishandled private customer data? Made unauthorized purchases with the company credit card? Made a bigoted comment about another employee? Someone can be a high performer and still be a bad employee that an employer ought to let go.
If the job description involves being present in the office, then being present in the office is the highest quality signal of being present in the office.
Sounds like Amazon doesn't trust its managers to track the attendance of their workers. There probably are many managers who would rather ignore the RTO requirement for their workers than need to replace ones who quit to work somewhere without the in office requirement. This allows Amazon to both see which employees are not sitting their butts in the office and which managers are letting them get away with it.
Many managers (at least the good ones) try to shield their folks from the uglier nuts and bolts of upper management. They would far rather focus on results rather than pressuring their folks to meet some arbitrary (and likely not even mathmatically correlated) goals around butts in seats.
Is Amazon in trouble? Are they really this willing to tighten the reins on their workforce for...what? Numbers that technically show people are showing up?
The ugly truth is that Amazon is probably just looking for ammunition to fire folks en masses without it being seen as a mass layoff.
If they didn't have badge data, they could monitor instant message/email and a million other metrics. I have no empathy. Engineers at Amazon actively work on products that track and monitor users. Its a bit ironic. This isn't some civil rights violation - its part and parcel when working for an international big tech corporation.
1. This is probably just badge-in and not badge-out data. I'd be surprised if you have to badge to exit the facility.
2. This may contain badge data when accessing other areas of the campus; such as elevators, executive offices, etc.
I'm curious how they're handling expected OOTO scenarios. E.g., a worker traveling on company assignment for several months, gets fired for not badging in frequently enough.
The enforcement spectrum on this is probably pretty broad, and probably felt most in areas where the company believes there is systemic under-performance; or in areas where the company wants to un-invest without explicitly coming out and saying it.
Fragmented teams will be reorganized and the process continues some underlying business metric, such as the labor component of SG&A, hits the desired corporate target.
For 1, it depends on the building. Early Amazon buildings did not require badging out. I'm my experience, they've been switching to badge out turnstiles over time. That said, I don't think they're using that data in the reports yet. I know of people who simply badge in and go home.
For ooto, they are not tracking this correctly. I received one of the nastygrams when I was on vacation. I forwarded it as my notice of resignation.
Presumably, but in an organization that size, I can easily imagine a manager with a large number of direct reports, perhaps scattered geographically too, where the employee's actual assignment or expected work location is completely opaque.
Especially if that employee is independent or soft reporting into another team.
Employee surveillance under a different name. Pick your poison, i.e. sell your soul to a big player, or a toxic startup, or someone with a size in between. It also depends on how you think about it. What's agreeable for you is toxic for someone else. I'd bristle at this but that's me. This market does not reward an ethics-first organization - rather, is it even possible to be an ethical organization.
Honestly, this is the kind of surveillance I can tolerate. Track when I punch and even for "signs of life", ie. if I just don't use my laptop/vpn for 2 months.
It's a very common policy in Indian IT companies to track hours. I started my career with Infosys and we have to maintain a daily average of 9.15 hours.
Never worked in a company that tracks hours after that. Amazon aspects workers to be available for on-call 24x7, it's very difficult to provide this level of support of you have to commute to office 3 days
'Tracking individual employee attendance'. This was perfectly normal 4 years ago for almost every single company around the world. Today it seems to be hot news. Wow, how rapidly changed, the world.
Lots of firms do use a “results oriented” model, I work for such a firm and really try to work only at firms with those values.
But we’re very much out of the broader societal norm here. Amazon checking that employees show up to work is very much a societal norm, and probably a global one for those working at a business.
Harping on standards and practices like this too hard risks making one appear out of touch with the average worker, bit of an “let them eat cake” type of statement. The average, non-HN type would see that headline and think “so what, my boss expects to physically see me daily” and has done so my entire life.
Original article refers to office attendance. Even hopping to a remote position with a visa (i.e. a H1-B) can take weeks to get approved, and it is not guaranteed. Many rightfully argue those holding one while working on site is, in many ways, a legal form of enslaved.
I guess my (possibly naive, definitely oversimplified) point was that if a foreigner wants a job where they don’t have to come to the office, why are they trying to get/maintain a visa in a place that might require them to come in? Seems they could seek most of those attendance-not-required US jobs from their home country (no visa required)
Like I realize this is charged up by the work from home discussion, but I'd expect any building with a badge to get in the door to be tracking those events, at the very least to detect unauthorized access, but also to detect folks claiming to be working when they're not even there. Basic fraud prevention stuff really.