Return-to-Office 'Collaboration' That's Measured Entirely by Badge Swipes
📌 Riffing on a real one: r/antiwork
Every return-to-office memo says the same word: collaboration. We're bringing everyone back for collaboration, for serendipity, for culture. And then the only thing anyone actually measures is whether your badge hit the turnstile enough times this week. Funny how that works out.
If it's about collaboration, why is the metric a turnstile
Collaboration is genuinely hard to measure, so nobody really tries. Badge swipes are trivially easy to measure, so that quietly becomes the real policy. You can sit in an empty office on back-to-back video calls with people in other cities — zero collaboration — and score a perfect week, because the metric was never collaboration. It was attendance. They just didn't want to say 'attendance' out loud because it sounds like 1995.
The quiet surveillance creep
Once the badge is the metric, the badge data becomes the management tool. Now there's a dashboard of who came in, when, and how long they stayed. That data does not stay politely in facilities; it drifts toward performance reviews, toward 'engagement' scores, toward the layoff spreadsheet where 'low office presence' becomes a convenient tiebreaker. You were told it was about culture. It's about a log file with your name in it.
What management is actually optimizing for
Sometimes RTO is about real-estate sunk cost. Sometimes it's about control — a manager who can't measure output falls back on measuring presence, because a full room feels like productivity even when nothing is being produced. Either way, the 'collaboration' language is cover for a metric that's really just 'we can see you.' Being seen is not the same as being effective, but it is so much easier to put on a chart.
If your office is genuinely a great place to work, you won't need a turnstile to enforce it — people show up for things that are worth showing up for. The badge mandate is what you reach for when the honest answer to 'why come in' is weak and you'd rather not say so. Measure the work. Leave the turnstile out of my performance review. I'm just saying.