Amazon Is Turning Its Workers Into 'Badgers'

Amazon's return-to-office push now comes with a new label: what kind of "badger" you are. The company has rolled out an expanded internal dashboard that lets managers track not just whether corporate employees come into the office, but also how many hours they spend there and which buildings they use, according to an internal document seen by Business Insider. The system, updating daily and covering a rolling eight-week period, is meant to spotlight workers who fall short of Amazon's expectation that most staffers be in the office five days a week.

Employees are sorted into three flagged categories. "Low-Time Badgers" are those whose median office time is under four hours per day over the eight-week stretch. "Zero Badgers" haven't entered any Amazon building in that span. "Unassigned Building Badgers" are those who swipe into offices other than their designated site more than half the time. The document says the metrics are designed to identify people operating "significantly outside" in-office norms, while instructing managers to "apply judgment" before taking any formal disciplinary action.

An Amazon spokesperson said the dashboard mostly repackages data that's been available for more than a year but makes it more uniform and accessible to managers. The company argues that in-person work is important to its culture and collaborative efforts, noting that its expectations for office attendance haven't changed. The tool covers corporate employees but excludes warehouse workers and contractors. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has defended the in-office push, noting last fall that he doesn't "love the word 'balance'" in "work-life balance," because "it implies a trade-off. I like 'work-life harmony,' because if you're happy at home, you'll be better at work."

Amazon has steadily tightened its approach since doing a 180 on anonymized attendance tracking in 2023, including targeting so-called "coffee badging"—brief check-ins meant only to register presence. Some staffers have criticized those moves as overly controlling. The company is also part of a broader trend: Samsung, Dell, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and PwC are among the employers now using badge data and similar dashboards to enforce in-office requirements, with some tying compliance to performance reviews or disciplinary measures. Meanwhile, not everyone thinks Amazon's in-office mandate is a smart move.