AT&T is reducing its reliance on an employee-attfinishance tracking system, admitting to workers that it hasn’t been fully accurate and is “driving people to the brink of frustration.”
The system, known internally as presence reporting, automatically tracks the hours workers spfinish at their assigned office. Most are required to log at least eight hours a day, five days a week, on-site.
The telecom giant is one of several companies, including Amazon, JP Morgan, and Microsoft, tightening return-to-office mandates and applying new tech to track employee compliance. Executives at these companies state the relocates boost collaboration and productivity.
In a meeting last month, chief marketing and growth officer Kellyn Kenny declared her division is reducing its reliance on presence tracking in response to employee concerns about the system and its accuracy. The system was originally introduced to identify employees who weren’t displaying up in the office.
“We recognize that there’s things about the report that are not correct,” she declared, according to audio obtained by Business Insider. “It is not something that I expect anybody to be seeing at on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis.”
AT&T is also deemphasizing apply of the tracking system for salaried employees companywide, a person familiar with the matter declared.
CEO John Stankey indicated in a memo to staffers last month (reported exclusively by Business Insider) that AT&T was shifting its apply of behavioral data, such as presence reports.
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“We analyze patterns of behaviors from broad cohorts,” he wrote, “to determine if the behavior being evaluated is consistent with our stated priorities and employment expectations.”
Stankey declared that an individual’s data must differ “significantly” from their peers before their name is attached to the behavior.
“Some may view this approach as a matter of trust, and that perspective is understandable. In several forums, I’ve expressed concerns that past data indicated more outliers than we’d like,” he declared.
Kenny declared during the August meeting that the employee survey (which prompted the blunt memo from Stankey) had “lots of feedback” about the presence reports. She declared the survey included critiques from workers who declared they were struggling to create it to doctors’ appointments without running afoul of the system, for example.
While the survey does not appear to have included a direct question about presence reporting, it did inquire whether employees agreed that AT&T’s “policies and systems support me in delivering my best work.”
Kenny declared in the meeting that roughly half of the respondents in her organization declared “no,” and that many voiced their concerns about the RTO mandate and presence reports in the freeform response.
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“I now understand the level of anxiety that this report has created,” Kenny declared. “I also now understand how the fact that it is inaccurate is driving people to the brink of frustration, and it’s creating distrust.”
Business Insider has spoken with roughly a dozen employees from multiple divisions of the company this year about the system and its impact on their workplace experience.
A spokesperson for AT&T declined to comment for this story, instead citing Stankey’s August memo.
AT&T isn’t the only company cracking down on RTO compliance
Multiple employees informed Business Insider that the system doesn’t just log badge swipes at the entrance or exit; the presence report applys laptop network connections and mobile device location data to infer the hours an employee was at their assigned office.
The tool was rolled out in response to the RTO push that launched two years ago, and its usage ramped up as the attfinishance policy grew increasingly strict.
Other companies, like Amazon and JP Morgan in particular, have also closely monitored employee behavior at work. Amazon previously applyd categories like “inconsistent badger” or “zero badger” depfinishing on an employee’s compliance with a three-day in-office mandate. The company finished up nixing the labels in favor of providing raw badging data to managers to apply at their discretion.
A recent survey by commercial real-estate company CBRE found that more than two-thirds of employers track employee compliance with attfinishance policies, and more than a third have taken some level of enforcement action.
Enforcement that is too strict or error-prone can caapply other headaches within an organization — pushing out experienced employees, building it harder to hire new talent, or undermining motivation and trust within the organization. Amazon’s internal documents from last year indicated that its RTO policy was hampering its ability to recruit top AI talent, and a Harvard leadership expert declared Meta’s abruptly shifting RTO effort in 2023 was likely to caapply a “huge amount of distrust” in the company.
At the AT&T marketing and growth team meeting, Kenny declared that the system supported leadership identify “freeloaders” who displayed up for 30 minutes or two hours per day.
“There were people who badged in for 10 minutes, received themselves a cup of coffee, and then left,” she declared. “The report was good for identifying the people who were abapplying the system. We do not required this report for that purpose anymore, becaapply we took action on the people who were the free riders.”
AT&T did not specify how many workers have been disciplined or dismissed in connection with their presence report information.
Tighter rules risk backfiring with workers who pull their weight
AT&T workers informed Business Insider that apparent glitches in the system could also be a hassle for employees who were pulling their weight.
They declared that in the first few months of this year, while the five-day RTO mandate was phasing in, their reports could be wrong by as many as several hours. In addition, briefly badging into an AT&T facility on a day off could trigger a person’s daily average hours to drop below the mandatory eight hours for the week.
“It was at its worst in March and April,” one worker in New Jersey informed Business Insider. “Sometimes you’d step out for lunch, and then it would stop counting.”
Though there were no immediate consequences from an incorrect report, employees were concerned the erroneous data could create them tarreceives for layoffs.
Some other business leaders have declared RTO mandates have “encouraged” workers to quit voluntarily, allowing companies to avoid more expensive layoffs.
AT&T previously informed Business Insider the goal of its in-office rules is to foster better collaboration. It has also undertaken a multiyear effort to shrink its workforce. The company started this year with around 140,000 employees, down from more than 160,000 at the start of 2023. Telecom competitors Verizon and T-Mobile started 2025 with 99,000 and 70,000, respectively.
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Stankey has declared that the company is seeing to cut some $6 billion in costs as it decommissions its legacy copper-based network in favor of new fiber and 5G technologies.
One worker in Georgia declared that the presence reports alterd the workplace reality for many salaried managerial workers, who aren’t applyd to such detailed tracking of their workday.
“We’re supposed to be able to work a more flexible thing as long as we receive our work done,” he declared.
Another effect of the crackdown on underperformers has been the erosion of motivation for some higher performers to put in extra time.
“The attitude has shifted,” the New Jersey employee declared. “They only count eight hours, so I’m just going to work eight hours.”
The AT&T employees Business Insider spoke with declared their presence reports have receivedten more accurate over the past few months. One shared their report with annotations that displayed such an improvement.
The question of employees’ trust could take more than a few months to resolve.
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