Office no-shows drive 40% jump in ANZ conduct cases
ANZ has put a number on what happens to staff who ignore its hybrid work rules, and it isn't a small one.
The bank dealt with 2,204 employee relations cases involving alleged breaches of its code of conduct in the 12 months to 30 September, a 40% rise on the year before. The figures are deep in its 2026 annual report, released on Monday and first picked over by The Sydney Morning Herald. The report doesn't leave much doubt about the cause. "The increase in cases has been mainly driven by an increased focus on office attendance non-compliance," it says.
Of those 2,204 cases, 670 ended with a formal consequence or the employee leaving: 405 warnings, 139 dismissals and 126 departures. That's roughly three in every 10 cases. The report doesn't say how many of the dismissals were for attendance alone, and ANZ declined to comment to the Herald. The bank employs about 39,200 full-time-equivalent staff, according to the same report.
The rule itself isn't new. ANZ expects staff to spend at least half their scheduled hours in an ANZ workplace, with the rest worked remotely. What has changed is the enforcement.
In August 2025, a few months after Nuno Matos took over as chief executive, managers were sent attendance records for their teams along with a pay scale. Staff in the office less than 20% of the time would miss out on a salary increase unless they had an exemption, and those coming in between 21% and 40% of the time could have variable pay cut by as much as half.
The memo told managers their job included "addressing low attendance early". This week's figures suggest plenty of them took it to heart.
Staff haven't taken it quietly. The Finance Sector Union has campaigned against the mandate since at least April 2024, when it said ANZ management rejected its call to repeal the policy despite internal staff survey results backing the union's concerns. The annual report puts employee engagement at 75%, though that figure includes contingent workers and isn't broken down by how often people work from home.
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Attendance as a conduct issue
The attendance numbers are in ANZ's Accountability and Consequence Framework, the same machinery the bank uses for risk and behaviour breaches. The annual report also says ANZ updated its code of conduct this year alongside its new values. Both moves sit under a court-enforceable undertaking with the prudential regulator, signed in April 2025, that requires a lasting lift in non-financial risk management and risk culture, as the first independent Promontory report on its remediation plan sets out.
Matos has pulled plenty of levers since. There were the 3,500 job cuts announced last year, a new set of corporate values, and a decision to tie middle and senior managers' bonuses to those values. Folding office attendance into the consequence framework fits the pattern. For HR teams watching on, the significance is in the framing: once attendance is treated as a conduct matter rather than a flexibility discussion, the conversation shifts from "what works for you?" to "you've breached policy".
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ANZ is tightening at a time when the regulatory current is running in the opposite direction, even if slowly.
In August, the Fair Work Commission added a working-from-home clause to the Clerks Award, which covers an estimated 1.56 million clerical and administrative employees. It stopped short of a right to work from home. But a request made under the new clause is a protected workplace right under section 340 of the Fair Work Act, and disputes can go to the Commission. The Full Bench described remote work in the sector as having become "an entrenched feature of employment". The final clause took effect on 26 October.
ANZ's staff are covered by the bank's enterprise agreement, which the union refers to as the 2023 ANZ Enterprise Agreement, so the Clerks clause doesn't bite there directly. The statutory right to request flexible work under section 65 of the Fair Work Act still applies to eligible employees whatever instrument covers them.
In Victoria, the Equal Opportunity Amendment (Work from Home) Bill 2026, which would give eligible workers a right to work from home two days a week, cleared the lower house in July. It then stalled in the upper house in September when it was sent to a select committee, after Premier Ben Carroll had already pushed its start date back to July 2027. With Victorians voting on 28 November, the bill's future now rests on the election result. ANZ, it's worth remembering, is headquartered in Melbourne.
Read next: Victoria's work-from-home bill stalls as businesses claim 'victory'
The tribunal is watching the process
Individual cases show the Commission will back employers on remote work, but only when the process stands up.
In October 2025, it ordered Westpac to approve a long-serving mortgage employee's request to work from home so she could manage school drop-offs and pick-ups. The bank hadn't shown reasonable business grounds for refusing her and hadn't properly consulted. It didn't help that a manager had told her working from home was "no substitution for childcare", a line quoted in the ruling.
This year has gone the other way in some cases. In Gurung v Knauf Gypsum, the Commission accepted that a payroll role needing uninterrupted focus gave the employer reasonable grounds to refuse a carer's request, and in a separate case against AGL Energy it found an employee's existing performance problems justified a refusal. In both, the employer could point to specific evidence.
Read next: Westpac worker wins right to work from home after bank refuses flexible arrangement
What HR should take from it
The ANZ figures prove a hard-line attendance policy can be enforced at scale. They don't prove it's cheap or risk-free.
The first job is keeping two groups apart. Someone who simply isn't turning up is a policy compliance issue. Someone with a pending or approved flexible work request under section 65 of the Fair Work Act, whether as a carer, a person with disability or for another listed reason, is in a different legal position, and refusing them by pointing to a blanket policy is exactly how Westpac came unstuck.
Exemptions need to be written down and applied the same way across teams. If badge-swipe data is feeding pay and disciplinary decisions, it has to be accurate, and staff should be able to challenge it. Managers being held to account for their teams' attendance, as ANZ's are, need training on where a conversation becomes a formal process.
It also pays to be clear about why people are being asked in. Jayne Clow, head of people and culture for Australia and New Zealand at NTT Data, told HRD in January that mandates without a clear purpose risk "presence without productivity".
Then there's the workload. A 40% jump in employee relations cases lands on someone's desk, and it's usually HR's. Before copying ANZ's approach, it's worth asking whether the outcome you want is people in the office, or a file full of warnings.
