AT&T tracked employee attendance to find ‘freeloaders.’ Now, it admits the system is driving workers to the ‘brink of frustration.’

AT&T is reducing its reliance on an employee-attendance 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 spend 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 using new tech to track employee compliance. Executives at these companies say the moves boost collaboration and productivity, though the results so far are mixed.

In a meeting last month, chief marketing and growth officer Kellyn Kenny said 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 showing up in the office.

“We recognize that there’s things about the report that are not correct,” she said, according to audio obtained by Business Insider. “It is not something that I expect anybody to be looking at on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis.”

AT&T is also deemphasizing use of the tracking system for salaried employees companywide, a person familiar with the matter said.

CEO John Stankey indicated in a memo to staffers last month (reported exclusively by Business Insider) that AT&T was shifting its use of behavioral data, such as presence reports.

“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 said 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 said.

Kenny said during the August meeting that the employee survey (which prompted the blunt memo from Stankey) had “lots of feedback” about the presence reports. She said the survey included critiques from workers who said they were struggling to make it to doctors’ appointments without running afoul of the system, for example.

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While the survey does not appear to have included a direct question about presence reporting, it did ask whether employees agreed that AT&T’s “policies and systems support me in delivering my best work.”

Kenny said in the meeting that roughly half of the respondents in her organization said “no,” and that many voiced their concerns about the RTO mandate and presence reports in the freeform response.

“I now understand the level of anxiety that this report has created,” Kenny said. “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 told Business Insider that the system doesn’t just log badge swipes at the entrance or exit; the presence report uses 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 began two years ago, and its usage ramped up as the attendance policy grew increasingly strict.

Other companies, like Amazon and JP Morgan in particular, have also closely monitored employee behavior at work. Amazon previously used categories like “inconsistent badger” or “zero badger” depending on an employee’s compliance with a three-day in-office mandate. The company ended up nixing the labels in favor of providing raw badging data to managers to use at their discretion.

A recent survey by commercial real-estate company CBRE found that more than two-thirds of employers track employee compliance with attendance policies, and more than a third have taken some level of enforcement action.

Enforcement that is too strict or error-prone can cause other headaches within an organization — pushing out experienced employees, making 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 said Meta’s abruptly shifting RTO effort in 2023 was likely to cause a “huge amount of distrust” in the company.

At the AT&T marketing and growth team meeting, Kenny said that the system helped leadership identify “freeloaders” who showed up for 30 minutes or two hours per day.

“There were people who badged in for 10 minutes, got themselves a cup of coffee, and then left,” she said. “The report was good for identifying the people who were abusing the system. We do not need this report for that purpose anymore, because 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 told Business Insider that apparent glitches in the system could also be a hassle for employees who were pulling their weight.

They said 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 told 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 make them targets for layoffs.

Some other business leaders have said RTO mandates have “encouraged” workers to quit voluntarily, allowing companies to avoid more expensive layoffs.

While AT&T previously told 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. It 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.

Stankey has said that the company is looking 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 said that the presence reports changed the workplace reality for many salaried managerial workers, who aren’t used to such detailed tracking of their workday.

“We’re supposed to be able to work a more flexible thing as long as we get our work done,” he said.

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 said. “They only count eight hours, so I’m just going to work eight hours.”

The AT&T employees Business Insider spoke with said their presence reports have gotten more accurate over the past few months. One shared their report with annotations that showed such an improvement.

The question of employees’ trust could take more than a few months to resolve.

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