What is coffee badging?

Coffee Badging is a trend in which employees badge into the office but only stay for a short time—just long enough to grab a coffee and attend a meeting. The trend was first coined in a 2023 Owl Labs report, which found that 58% of hybrid employees admitted to coffee badging.

Coffee Badging has come under renewed scrutiny as a way for employees to skirt the requirements. Companies like Amazon and Dell have tried to crack down on coffee badging by enforcing minimum in-office time policies.

This post is part of a series from Next Workplace - Strategy + Change on "How to Get People Back to the Office". We would love to hear your thoughts, or follow us for more content.

Is Coffee Badging even an issue?

There is no doubt about it: commuting to the office just to clock in and out is an absurd practice.

Are these simply bad or ineffective employees who are quietly quitting? Not necessarily..

It is easy for productive employees to get caught up battling mandates that threaten the flexibility they have grown used to. If people don’t feel ownership over their ways of working, it is hard for them to see or appreciate the organisation's underlying objectives.

There are also scenarios where people may ‘coffee badge’ with good intent. There is real value in a quick face-to-face catchup during heavy and focused deadline periods. Or engineers who need some direction in a stand-up, then retreat home to write code or design until the late hours of the evening.

DATA DOESN’T GIVE YOU THE FULL PICTURE

Trying to measure what’s happening is flawed. Office attendance data lacks context, can’t discern intent, and doesn’t discriminate the ‘good’ employees from the ‘bad’.

Importantly, questioning someone’s intent flies in the face of the bigger question, which is, ‘How do we have trustworthy relationships with employees, build teams that work well together, and weed out the quiet quitters who take advantage of flexibility?’

The issue with blanket office mandates is that they are not nearly nuanced enough. Quiet quitters are bad workers, whether they are at home or at work. Implementing the wrong policies can lead to the wrong behaviours and can leave an organisation exposed to losing talent to competitors with better and more sophisticated approaches to work.

What do you think?

This post is part of a series from Next Workplace - Strategy + Change on "How to Get People Back to the Office". We would love to hear your thoughts, or follow us for more content.