Employees discover they're being micromanaged upon return to office: 'You get flagged... if you aren't located near your manager'

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Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Dec 7, 2025 3:00 PM EST

This micromanagement has gotten totally out of hand at this major company, and people are guessing that employees won't tolerate this kind of treatment for long. 

It's a tough balance to strike, I get it. As a boss, you need to monitor your employees in order to ensure that they're putting in their hours and submitting solid work. That is literally your job to do so. However, no one agrees on exactly the best way to do it. If you over-manage your employees, they grow hostile and unhappy. If you don't check in with them enough, they think that their bosses don't care about their work, and they might slack off. Finding a middle ground is key, and it's the sign of a strong management team. 

You need to be able to trust your workers to hand over their deliverables, while also cutting them some slack for things like wanting to go home early for the day or needing extra time to work on a project before submitting it. You're supervising humans, not robots, so there's no need to treat them like unfeeling drones.

This mega-corporation is reportedly shopping some new rules as their employees return to work, and it's shocking how intense these new surveillance methods are. It seems like they'll be punished for being away from their desks for too long — and also for being away from their bosses and coworkers! That's all very intense, and I wouldn't be surprised if employees start walking out the door instead of being micromanaged to the extreme. Who wants to work in an office where every little move you make is subject to scrutiny from all the higher-ups? It's just too intense, and this company would be wise to scale back those efforts. 

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  • 01
    Man in black tee shirt working on laptop looks around nervously, in background are assorted surveillance cameras on blue backdrop
    via Resource Database For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 02
    Office Life on Amazon RTO Latest from Amazon RTO enforcement: Coffee badging is dead: system will flag with less than 4 hours of average daily presence. swipe and leave will no longer be acceptable.
    via @JoinBlind
  • 03
    5-day reality: The standard expectation is hard-coded as 5 days/week (unless your building is officially space-constrained, which allows 3).
    via @JoinBlind
  • 04
    Location tracking: now being tracked on where you sit. You get flagged if you use your assigned building less than 50% of the time or if you aren't located near your manager/ peers.
    via @JoinBlind
  • 05
    While the text tells managers not to remotely monitor badge swipes, the dashboard provides them with a detailed 8-week individual history of every employee's swipes updated daily.
    via @JoinBlind
  • 06
    Kitten @kitten_beloved Mark my words, "we have to go to a comfortable indoor office to get our quarter million comp package and they're checking to make sure we actually do" will go down in history as one of the whiniest things anyone has ever said
    via @JoinBlind
  • 07
    @bairanyc⚫ This is insane
    via @JoinBlind
  • 08
    Alex Noonan @AlexNoonan6. Wild that they use the same system for the white collar folks that they use for the warehouse workers
    via @JoinBlind
  • 09
    Man in black tee shirt with laptop in front of him looks anxiously at person to his right with black hair and a wristwatch with a laptop in front of them
    via Jeremy on Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 10
    zapdora @0xZapdora the western office is a Stonic product meant to mindbreak and demoralize you, crush you into dust until you can be crammed into a k pod and your corpuscle fluids can be poured into your replacement's coffee
    via @JoinBlind
  • 11
    Randall Kanna Fra... @RandallK... Companies are doing this because they think they'll need to do massive layoffs in a few years because of Al. And it's cheaper to have people quit because they don't want to return to office. Hence, they'll save money with tiny layoffs and RTO mandates over a period of years instead of all at once later.
    via @JoinBlind
  • 12
    But model improvements are barely noticeable anymore so that won't happen. Not to mention when Al does "takeover”, who will buy all the products if everyone is unemployed? Just shooting themselves in the foot!
    via @JoinBlind
  • 13
    And they lose their best employees because the people who want to stay remote will quit.... ????
    via @JoinBlind

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workplace return to office security surveillance bosses camera
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