How do you prove you went to the office? Inside Charlotte’s banking ‘badge wars’

On a Sunday morning a while back, a Bank of America senior vice president made an unusual visit to the office.

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He wasn’t meeting a client. He wasn’t planning to answer emails. He didn’t really have any work to do there at all.

He just needed to swipe his badge.

For weeks, his job had him traveling, sometimes putting in 12- to 15-hour days meeting with clients. But his understanding, he told me, was that none of that registered as an office day in the system Bank of America used to track his attendance. And on paper, anyway, he believed his numbers had started looking … non-compliant.

So after his workout, he went to a Bank of America building and swiped in. He rode up to his floor. He walked over toward his workspace. He even checked his locker — partly, he said, because he felt like he ought to have some reason for being there.

Then he left.

The funny thing, according to Bank of America, is that the swipe didn’t even help. When I referenced the anecdote the senior VP gave me, the bank told me weekends don’t count toward the office attendance requirement and that business travel is a valid excuse for not swiping.

Welcome to Charlotte’s badge wars.

At the center of it are Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Truist, three banks that collectively employ tens of thousands of people around Charlotte. For each, the return-to-office debate has entered a strange new phase, and it isn’t just about whether employees should come into the office anymore.

Now there’s another question: How do you prove they did?

At Truist, employees are generally expected to work on-site five days a week. But a single qualifying badge swipe can register as an office day on an employee’s Workforce Experience Dashboard, regardless of how long that employee remains there.

At Wells Fargo, eligible employees generally have to be in the office three full days a week, and the bank’s system can measure how much time they spend there, with eight hours constituting a full workday.

And Bank of America, beginning Sept. 14, is explicitly outlawing what it calls “swipe and go.” Employees covered by its three-day hybrid schedule will be expected to stay for their entire workday — although Bank of America told me it isn’t introducing technology to measure whether they actually do.

So we’ve arrived at a wonderfully weird moment in the evolution of white-collar work. Companies are trying to turn physical presence into data, while employees are figuring out exactly what the data measures.

And sometimes, as that BofA senior VP demonstrated on that Sunday morning, the data starts influencing behavior even when the behavior accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Wells Fargo employees have been playing this game for years.

When the bank first brought employees back to its offices after the pandemic, the basic requirement for many was simple: Show up three days a week. And the obvious way to tell whether someone showed up was also simple: the badge.

Employees pretty quickly figured that out, with some beginning to do what came to be known in corporate America as “coffee badging.” Go to the office. Swipe in. Grab a cup of coffee, talk to a co-worker or two, then head home and finish the workday there.

One former Wells employee remembered people making an even more abbreviated appearance called a “cameo” — badging in and turning right back around. Like several current and former bank employees I interviewed, he asked not to be named because of concerns about professional repercussions from speaking candidly about internal workplace practices. He told me he knew of co-workers who would go uptown socially and essentially say, “Hang on, man, let me swing by the office.” They’d stop at Wells, badge in and out, and continue with their night — thereby registering the office day.

So the bank got smarter.

It wasn’t enough merely to enter the building anymore. The bank also began looking for evidence that employees had connected their computers to Wells Fargo’s network from inside the office. But they worked around that, too. A current Wells Fargo employee described people coming in, plugging in their laptops long enough to establish that they were there, then leaving.

So Wells Fargo got smarter again.

Today, according to internal guidance I obtained, the bank doesn’t merely record whether eligible employees enter an office. It can calculate how long they’re there, using the time between their first arrival and last departure. And Wells Fargo defines “full” as an admirably precise eight hours.

The rules get stranger from there.

Take four or more hours of PTO and, for reporting purposes, it counts as a full eight-hour day. Approved business travel generally counts as a full in-office day, too. Leaving briefly for lunch, meanwhile, generally doesn’t stop the clock.

The bank also tells managers to take a longer view. An occasional medical appointment, sick day, childcare problem or other short-term disruption generally shouldn’t materially affect an employee’s compliance. But the stakes are real: Wells Fargo’s guidance says recurring failure to meet the in-office expectations can affect performance evaluations and ultimately result in discipline, including termination.

If Wells Fargo has built the most elaborate system for measuring office attendance, Truist has gone in almost the opposite direction. Its five-day rule sounds considerably tougher. Its method for measuring it is another matter.

Truist sent me a statement that said being together in person “strengthens collaboration” and “accelerates decision-making.” But I also obtained Truist’s internal FAQ for its Workforce Experience Dashboard. For purposes of that dashboard, an eligible office day is registered by a qualifying badge swipe.

As for how long the employee has to stay? The document actually answers that question: It doesn’t matter.

A qualifying swipe counts “regardless of the length of time on-site.” Which means that, at least as far as the dashboard is concerned, Truist has managed to combine the toughest attendance requirement of Charlotte’s three big banks with perhaps the easiest definition of attendance.

In fact, a person familiar with Truist’s return-to-office policy said the apparent looseness is intentional — that managers are supposed to have discretion to accommodate the different ways employees and teams work.

One Truist financial manager I spoke with showed me how much difference that can make in real life.

His division is officially five days a week in the office. He isn’t. He generally goes in around three days a week. During one recent week, he worked from home all five. His manager knew. The manager’s attitude, he told me, is essentially, If you’ve got a doctor’s appointment, need to get your oil changed or otherwise have a reason to work remotely, say so and get your work done.

He’s aware of other Truist managers, he said, who are considerably stricter. But the bottom line is that at Charlotte’s big banks, five days doesn’t necessarily mean five days. And three days doesn’t necessarily mean three days.

And apparently a day doesn’t always mean a day.

Starting Sept. 14, Bank of America employees who are eligible for the company’s hybrid schedule will still generally work three days in the office and two remotely.

But the rules are getting more specific.

The two remote days can’t be consecutive — and for that purpose, Friday and Monday count as consecutive. Bank of America told me one reason is real estate. Spreading employees across the week makes more efficient use of office space instead of packing everyone in on the same few days.

And when employees do come in, they’re expected to stay for their normally scheduled workday.

The bank’s internal guidance is unusually explicit about what doesn’t count. Working part of the day in the office and part remotely, it now says, isn’t an office day. Neither is “badging in and leaving shortly after.”

The requirement has teeth: Bank of America’s guidance says noncompliance can affect an employee’s year-end performance rating and lead to discipline, including termination.

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There’s at least one interesting wrinkle. Bank of America’s compliance reporting is based on workplace-entry badge swipes. Managers can see badge data showing when employees enter a Bank of America workplace. But a person familiar with the policy told me the bank isn’t using IP addresses or some other technological measure to determine whether an employee remains there for the full workday.

So I asked the obvious question. How does Bank of America know whether someone actually stayed? The answer was refreshingly simple. It doesn’t. Managers are responsible for making sure their employees follow the full-day requirement. As far as measuring it technologically goes, that part is essentially an honor system.

Which means that, as of Sept. 14, Charlotte’s three banking giants will have arrived at three very different answers to the same surprisingly complicated question.

At Truist: Did you swipe in?

At Wells Fargo: Did you stay eight hours?

At Bank of America: Did you swipe in — and did you stay like you said you would?

If all of this seems a little absurd, Nicholas Bloom would like to explain why it also makes perfect sense.

Bloom is a Stanford University economist who has spent years studying remote and hybrid work. When I described Charlotte’s badge wars to him — the swiping, the dashboards, the eight-hour calculations, that apparently pointless Sunday visit — he saw a familiar problem.

Instead of thinking only about whether an employee is productive, Bloom said, a manager now has to worry about whether this particular employee is coming into the office enough.

“Suddenly, you focus less on performance and more on days in the office,” he told me.

Using considerably less academic language, Bloom pointed out that this isn’t necessarily what the owners of a bank are hoping their managers spend their time thinking about.

“The shareholders definitely don’t want that,” he said. “They want you to focus on freaking making money.”

None of this means Bloom thinks everyone should be working from their kitchen table forever. Quite the opposite.

When I described Bank of America’s basic three-days-in, two-days-remote arrangement, he called it “perfectly reasonable.” In one randomized trial he co-authored involving more than 1,600 Trip.com employees, working from home two days a week had no measurable effect on performance reviews or promotions while reducing quit rates by one-third.

What he questions is whether counting office days tells a company what it really wants to know. Especially when the counting isn’t very good.

A badge swipe can tell your employer that your badge entered a building. It can’t tell what you accomplished once you got there. And it certainly can’t tell whether the employee who didn’t swipe in spent 12 hours somewhere else making money for the company.

Bloom compared that to police trying to enforce a 65-mph speed limit with a radar gun whose margin of error is 20 mph.

“If you tell me I can’t tell the difference between 65 and 85,” he told me, “there’s not much use in that. And that’s kind of the situation with swipes.”

There is another possibility employees kept raising with me, independently and across banks.

Maybe all of this isn’t simply about collaboration, culture or office utilization. Maybe some employers wouldn’t particularly mind if tougher return-to-office rules wind up making people choose to leave voluntarily.

I want to be careful here: I did not find evidence that Bank of America, Wells Fargo or Truist adopted their policies in order to push employees out. But the suspicion is real. Two Bank of America employees independently told me they suspected stricter enforcement could help reduce headcount through voluntary departures. Two former Wells Fargo employees raised the same possibility.

Bank of America rejected the idea when I put it directly to the company. The changes, a person familiar with the policy told me, are about collaboration, professional development, client service and making better use of office space — not encouraging employees to quit. (Wells did not respond to specific questions for this column.)

Whether attrition is the intent, though, is different from whether attrition is an effect. That part is easier to establish.

The Bank of America senior vice president told me an employee who wanted to remain fully remote ultimately found another remote job and left. One of the former Wells Fargo employees I spoke with knew someone who did the same.

Bloom said the broader research makes the effect unsurprising: Reduce remote flexibility and some employees will leave.

So yes, he added, a stricter return-to-office mandate could be used as a relatively cheap way to reduce headcount. But there’s an obvious problem with that strategy. The people who leave aren’t necessarily going to be the people the company would choose to lose.

Employees with attractive alternatives may be the ones most able to walk.

Nearly everyone I interviewed could identify some value in being around coworkers.

The Bank of America senior vice president I spoke with talked about relationships and informal conversations that are easier in person. A Wells Fargo employee told me there are days when he likes escaping a noisy house and working somewhere quiet.

But I also heard this over and over: People commute into an office, then spend the day talking to people through a computer.

One Bank of America employee told me coworkers sitting on the same floor sometimes join the same meeting virtually. The Truist financial manager I spoke with said he often drives to his assigned office, sits among people he doesn’t work with and conducts his meetings virtually from there. A current Wells employee who lives in Cabarrus County figures he needs to catch a train around 6 a.m. to get his eight office hours in and still make it home in time to help coach his kids’ sports team. The majority of the meetings he attends from the office, meanwhile, are on Teams.

When I characterized it as commuting to the office to work remotely from the office, the Wells employee replied: “That’s right — exactly right.”

Maybe that’s what makes the whole situation so absurd.

Yes, there are absolutely some good reasons to bring people together. After all the badge swipes and dashboards and eight-hour calculations, though, sometimes all you’ve accomplished is getting someone to commute to an office to sit on Teams.

And, I mean, maybe the system itself isn’t even broken.

But when a Bank of America senior vice president goes out of his way on a Sunday morning to swipe his badge after spending all week doing his job, doesn’t it seem like something needs fixing?

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