Central Bank of Ireland gives managers lists of staff breaching hybrid attendance rules

The Central Bank of Ireland monitors compliance with its 50% on-site attendance requirement using building-access data and passes lists of non-compliant staff to their managers, according to Freedom of Information figures reported by the Irish Independent on 8 August. Compliance among the regulator’s roughly 2,100 staff rose from 42% in August 2025 to 86% by June 2026 after monitoring began, with persistent non-compliance – around 5% of staff – “addressed as a performance issue”.

Why this matters

When the financial regulator itself treats hybrid-attendance shortfalls as a performance-management matter backed by badge data, it signals to every large Irish employer that this approach is acceptable practice. If you work hybrid in Ireland, assume your building-access data can be, and increasingly is, used to check your attendance against policy – and that informal flexibility tolerated in 2024–25 may now be logged. Anyone whose personal circumstances make a 50% on-site rate difficult should formalise arrangements through their employer’s flexible-working process rather than relying on managerial discretion.

Context

Ireland’s statutory review of the right to request remote working, published in March 2026, found a 94% approval rate for requests and recommended no legislative change – so attendance disputes in Ireland are being resolved through workplace policy and monitoring rather than new law. The Central Bank’s numbers show how quickly measured compliance shifts once monitoring starts, a pattern UK banks pursuing similar mandates will have noticed.