Attention Office Resisters: The Boss Is Counting Badge Swipes
The work ID, long used for gaining entry to the office, now has a new job: tracking how long people stay. Bosses are stepping up office surveillance this fall, vowing to use regular reports from badge systems to determine how many people are adhering to the return-to-work policy. Facebook parent Meta Platforms told employees in August that managers will review badge data monthly to assess whether those assigned to an office are meeting a requirement to spend at least three days a week in-person; repeated violations could result in disciplinary action, including termination.
Google notified workers that badge-swipe data could be a way it enforces its in-office policies. Other companies, from Amazon to JPMorgan Chase, also keep tabs on attendance through badges or other methods. “We know who’s assigned to an office and should be working in an office," said Bob Pragada, CEO of the engineering and consulting firm Jacobs, which employs more than 60,000 people and has used badge-swipe data to monitor its office-occupancy levels.
The company tracks office attendance in the aggregate, and not on an individual basis, a spokeswoman said. For decades, badge systems served mostly as a security measure. After the Sept.
11 attacks, the technology proliferated, spreading from high-end buildings in major cities to offices nationwide. More recently, new technological developments—and the shift away from physical cards to mobile access—have made it significantly cheaper and easier for employers to extract and analyze data, said Matt Kopel, co-CEO of SwiftConnect, a building-access software provider that works with dozens of Fortune 500 companies. To gauge whether employees are actively working in the office—as opposed to swiping in and
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