Do you have coworkers who come into the office for just a few hours at a time? These people are often seen at the coffee machine and then not at all during the rest of the day, as if they’d vanished into thin air.
Which is not surprising, since they probably have.
Employees who practise “coffee badging” take advantage of open-space workplaces to sneak home after having made an appearance on company premises, so they can get on with their work in peace and quiet.
In their view, these quick visits should be enough to reassure their superiors that they’re working in the office. Therein lies a paradox of in-office culture, at least according to employees who prefer remote- or flexible-working setups.
Requiring staff to come to the office is, for many, about showing that one is at work, rather than concentrating on their professional missions. The idea is that the “real hard workers” are those who arrive early in the morning and leave late, or who walk quickly to the photocopier because they can’t afford to waste a single second.
Eating in a hurry in front of your computer can also help an employee look busy, as can complaining loudly about one’s workload – in short, taking part in “productivity theatre”, performative work that makes one look busy rather than genuine work.
Unlike “loud labourers”, those who take part in coffee badging are more discreet about their productivity theatrics. They prefer to chat with colleagues when they arrive, take care of mail distribution, or even propose a quick coffee to the manager to feign busy work.
Some may go as far as leaving a piece of clothing on their office chair to make it look like they’re still around, when in fact they’re on their way home.
Going to such lengths may seem pointless, but coffee badging is actually a fairly common practice in the working world. More than half (58%) of hybrid workers – those who combine in-person and remote work – have already “coffee badged”, according to the 2023 edition of Owl Labs’ “State of Hybrid Work” survey.
The authors found that certain demographics are more inclined than others to engage in coffee badging. For example, 62% of men say they use this technique, compared with only 38% of women. Millennials are more likely to coffee badge (63%) than Generation X (54%), Generation Z (43%) or baby boomers (38%).
But regardless of the coffee-badging employees’ gender or generation, the very existence of this phenomenon reveals that an insistence on in-office presence can, in some cases, be counterproductive. It encourages employees to use their energy on appearing to work at the office, instead of using it on their actual workload.
Furthermore, because it’s linked to the gaze of others, coffee badging contributes to creating a corporate culture based on a lack of autonomy and mistrust. This may discourage an employee or, in some cases, lead them to disengage.
This is why work experts advocate separating the notion of professionalism from in-office presence. If employers aim to make their staff want to come into the office, rather than force their hand, they’re not likely to see a rise in the number of coffee-badging employees – a practice that can degrade the quality of working life for all employees.