How Companies Like Amazon and JPMorgan Spy on Their Staff

Some companies use workplace-surveillance tools to keep tabs on their workforce, whether that's to see employees' productivity or monitor their comings and goings as the return-to-office debate rages on.

As Amazon escalates its RTO push, it's started tracking and sharing individual office-attendance records, Insider reported Thursday. Employees can see their own "Badge Report" on an internal HR dashboard showing the days they badged in for each of the past eight weeks.

The move is a reversal of an old policy of only tracking anonymized, aggregated office attendance data, which Amazon said was shared with managers, mostly for safety and space-planning purposes.

"This tool gives employees and managers visibility into the days they badged into a corporate building," Rob Munoz, an Amazon spokesperson, previously told Insider in an email. "The information will help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues."

Goldman Sachs was also using employee ID swipes to track who went to the office and ultimately help crack down on employees who weren't working in the office enough, Insider reported last year. JPMorgan has done the same, using swipe data to generate special reports and dashboards that managers then use to enforce in-office quotas, including via calls and emails from senior leaders to staffers who aren't complying.