The bosses who want bums back on seats

Commonwealth Bank has fired another shot in the war over working from home, telling employees they must spend at least four hours in the office for their visit to count towards their monthly attendance targets.

The new rule, which has been in place since late last year but was first reported by The Australian Financial Review on Monday, is the latest salvo in intensifying efforts by major employers to unwind COVID-era remote working practices and get more staff into the office for longer.

The bank introduced the rule after discovering that some employees were coming into the office for just one hour at a time before returning home in a practice known as “coffee badging”.

This is when employees turn up to the office and swipe their security “badges” to enter the building – and therefore show up on work IT systems as having attended the office – but only stick around for long enough to grab lunch or a coffee before leaving to work from somewhere else.

Some CBA employees were using coffee badging as a way of spending less time in the office without falling foul of the bank’s requirement to spend 50 per cent of their working days each month in the office.

The bank, which delivered a $5.13 billion first-half profit yesterday, introduced the 50 per cent rule in July 2023.

“We are continuing to see increasing numbers of our teams working from our offices well above the 50 per cent minimum,” a CBA spokesman said in response to questions about the new four-hour rule.

“On the days our people come into the office we do, unsurprisingly, expect them to stay for the majority of the day.”

The bank is far from the only major employer to have mandated minimum attendance levels – even if some data, including surveys by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, suggest mandates have not led to a significant increase in office attendance.

New research released by recruitment agency Robert Half this week indicates one in five Australian employers require their staff to spend at least three days in the office each week.

Based on a survey of 500 Australian employers, the survey also found that employers were gradually introducing stricter office attendance rules, with the average number of mandated in-office days in Australia edging up from 3.43 days in 2024 to 3.64 days in 2025.

Supermarket giant Woolworths joined the mandate push on Monday, telling its 10,000 or so office-based employees that they would need to attend the workplace at least three days a week from October.

The mandate will be phased in gradually and brings the company in line with rival retailer Coles, which announced last November that it would move to a three-day mandate over six months.

Woolworths’ hybrid working changes are part of a broader restructure to reduce costs and meet customers’ changing expectations. Office-based staff have been told some of their roles will be made redundant during the restructure.

We also revealed this week how McKinsey global managing partner Bob Sternfels told staff the consulting giant remained committed to diversity and would not change its policies to comply with US President Donald Trump’s executive order. This was after Accenture ditched its own DEI policies to prevent losing billions of dollars worth of work with the US federal government.

A McKinsey spokeswoman simultaneously suggested the consultancy – which has been one of the most vocal advocates of increasing workplace diversity – was compliant with the new restrictions as it did not have diversity quotas or other formal targets when hiring or promoting staff.

Ruth Medd , the founder of Women on Boards , a lobby group that advocates for an increase in the number of female directors, said there was “a conflict between wanting to promote more females and not having formal targets”.

“Maybe [McKinsey] didn’t have numerical targets but clearly had the aim of getting more women into leadership. It’s semantics,” she said.

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