You show up at your office to introduce yourself in person, but then leave as soon as you can? There’s a word for your secret strategy: “coffee badging.”
It’s when you show up to the office long enough to grab a coffee or attend a meeting expressly to fulfill office mandates — while continuing to primarily work from home whenever you can.
This new workplace jargon was popularized by video conferencing company Owl Labs. defined like “showing up at the office and then leaving.” In its 2023 edition report Of 2,000 full-time U.S. workers, 58% of hybrid employees said they “wore a coffee badge,” and an additional 8% said they were interested in trying it.
And as hybrid arrangements have become a more permanent feature of office life, coffee badges are still here to stay. In a more recent LinkedIn update from June survey Out of 1,568 people, 19% of LinkedIn users said they still use the “coffee badge” to get to work.
Amanda, an IT project manager for a Chicago-based health insurance company, is one of them. Her company has a hybrid policy, and Amanda, who asked to keep her last name private for her work, said managers are open with employees about tracking badges used for “badge reports,” which calculate the percentage of people in the office by week or month.
She hasn’t had a conversation about her own attendance record, but knowing that swiping her badge could potentially cause a performance issue, she’s become more diligent about traveling to the office because she “doesn’t want that conversation to come up at all.”
As a result, Amanda stays for at least four hours to signal “I’m here,” she says, but she will return home as soon as she can. The feeling of having her presence monitored makes her “uncomfortable.”
If she could, she would be a 100% remote employee, as she finds office days with travel exhausting and “a waste of time” since her direct boss works in another city and she has video meetings with remote colleagues.
“I don’t want to be here. I can do it from home,” Amanda said.
In this way, distributing coffee badges at work and outside of work is a way to regain control and autonomy over how your work is done. An employer can ask me to dedicate a portion of my time, but not a second more than necessary, such is the strategic philosophy of the coffee badge.
Why coffee badges may also be an answer to employer surveillance
And it’s not just in employees’ heads: Badge logs can have real negative consequences on a person’s career. In January, a professional services firm would have shown Some partner analyses have linked office attendance from turnstile data to mid-year performance scores.
For his book, “The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired—and Why We Need to Fight Back Now”, interviewed journalist Hilke Schellmann, an HR manager who told the story of a company making promotion and firing decisions based on badge log data.
“They wanted to promote the people who were working the longest hours in the office, so they looked at swipe card data,” Schellmann said of the company. “And then when the pandemic hit, they had to look at layoffs. They wanted to use that kind of data again to understand who the least productive people were, so they looked at badge data logs.”
But to be clear, your badges are a false signal of your job performance.
Using badges to determine productivity “could harm people who are on sick leave or people who have caregiving responsibilities and who we know are literally less likely to be at their desks than others,” Schellmann said.
So why are employers so tempted to look for deeper meaning in badge records despite their obvious flaws? Perhaps it’s because they’re part of a growing field of people analytics.
“Companies want to use the data they have on their employees,” Schellmann said, noting that there’s also a long-standing mentality that “managers just want to look around the room and see butts in seats.”
“It’s all about impression management,” she added.
But a word of warning to the coffee badger: You should stay longer than just a cup of coffee, because managers can easily check how long you’ve been in the office and may feel betrayed by your comings and goings.
“Today, with digital technology, everything leaves a trace, and that trace can be verified by superiors,” Schellmann said.
How to Make Coffee Badging Work for You
You can either go to the office reluctantly or be pragmatic about the guidelines in place. The latter option may prove useful in changing your attitude.
“Try reframing the coffee badge so that you feel like you’re making the most of the situation,” suggested Archana Bharathan, an executive coach at Columbia Business School.
Bharathan said she would go to the office fewer than three days a week than planned if she had the choice, “but I would still go because I see the benefits.”
Her role requires her to build and deepen relationships with her colleagues, so she sees face-to-face time as an asset, but she acknowledges that if she were a one-person contributor who primarily made Zoom calls, her productivity might decrease.
Bharathan’s advice to other coffee lovers is to find ways to make time spent at the office productive. She suggests scheduling in-person meetings.
“If you have the ability to pick and choose which three days you need to be there, think about how you can potentially combine your commute with other things that require attention in your personal life, (like) if you have to run errands,” she said.
And if you’re the manager of a team that uses the “coffee badge,” you should take a closer look at the reasons behind this trend.
Ask yourself: “Are people who spend more time in the office performing better? Are they coming to meetings and collaboration spaces? Or are they simply spending time commuting to Zoom calls from the office instead of from home?” suggests Bonnie Dilber, head of recruiting at Zapier, an app automation company.
“Good managers focus their teams on high-impact actions, so I would encourage any employer who sees their employees simply meeting a minimum expectation in the office to ask themselves whether that expectation is actually going to have an impact,” she continued. “If the answer is yes, help your employees recognize that so they spend more time in the office, and if the answer is no, I would reexamine that requirement.”
A word of advice: Giving someone a coffee is not a reliable indicator of their performance. Being busy does not equal accomplishment. Seeing a coworker physically typing at their desk next to you does not mean they are actually working.
Amanda is right. Instead of basing it on the number of badges an employee has received, she would like managers to “consider the actual work done and feedback from others who have worked with the individual as a true metric.”This article was originally published on The HuffPost.
