If you’re not familiar with the term we used in the title of this piece, let’s define that before we go any further. Coffee Badging is one of a slew of new work-related terms to hit the public’s consciousness since we put the pandemic behind us and some companies have begun mandating that their employees spend a certain amount of time at the office.
Specifically, Coffee Badging describes showing up to the office because the boss says you have to be there three days a week, swiping your badge to show you were there, grabbing a coffee, and then going back home to actually start your workday.
Given that very few office jobs make use of an actual time clock, badge swipes are the substitute, and although it’s entirely possible to track the number of hours between a swipe in and a swipe out, most of the return to work policies drafted so far have only specified the number of days per week that office time is required – it doesn’t say anything about the number of hours per day that are required.
Predictably, employees are taking advantage of this, adhering to the letter of the policy, but probably violating the spirit in which it was intended.
It’s not quite malicious compliance, since there’s no actual malice involved, but it is clear that most employees are interested in holding onto their newfound freedom and flexibility and are doing what they can to accomplish that goal.
So now that we’ve defined what it is, exactly, let’s dig deeper into the two possible futures. Down one path, Coffee Badging becomes a permanent fixture in the working world. A trend that’s here to stay. Down the other, it is slowly ground out of existence by better and more precise return to work (RTO) policies that specify a number of hours per week. There’s a strong argument to be made for both. Let’s take a closer look.
The Coffee Badging Is Here To Stay Argument
This argument goes something like this: Right now, slightly more than a third of American workers do at least some of their work from home. Pre-pandemic, about a quarter of American workers spent at least part of the week at home, but the pandemic saw that surge to 35%, and the number is likely to increase further over time.
So, working from home is already a permanent fixture on the corporate landscape. Given that, and given the fact that a growing number of studies indicate that RTO policies don’t actually do anything to boost productivity, and may harm it in some cases (employee resentment), tightening the screws on those policies begins to look like a solution in search of a problem to solve. That’s not very productive.
In addition to that, during the pandemic, legions of employees rediscovered what work/life balance actually means, and a vanishingly small percentage of them actually want to spend more time in the office. With some companies using generous work from home policies as an incentive for employment, getting your employees to spend more time in the office is going to be an increasingly hard sell as time goes by. Is it really worth it? Probably not.
But now let’s look at the other side.
Coffee Badging – A Passing Fad
This view holds that the pandemic was an extraordinary, once a century event that’s not likely to be repeated anytime soon. Given that, the leeway that employees enjoyed during that event should go away, and there’s a lot of pressure on business owners to enforce that decision.
After all, office buildings represent significant fixed (sunk) costs, and if they’re standing mostly empty, that poses some serious challenges to business owners. What’s the point of having all that office space, after all, if nobody ever bothers to use it? And if companies are put in the position of all having to sell off their unused capacity, that’s going to crater the market for those properties, which will see most companies taking a loss. Not a great position to be in.
While that doesn’t describe every business owner’s situation, it has proved true often enough to prompt a great many business owners to begin drafting return to office policies, which is what led to the rise of Coffee Badging in the first place.
Business owners have tended to take a dim view of this “subjective interpretation” of their policies, and some of them are beginning to respond by building more specificity into them, requiring X number of hours per week, rather than the more open-ended way they were originally written, with Amazon being the most recent to make headlines for that very reason.
Our Verdict?
While there will undoubtedly be a lot of ebbs and flows as companies experiment with different policies and refinements to existing policies, we feel that working from home is here to stay. It described a growing segment of the American workforce before the pandemic, and while that event did cause a surge, it didn’t change the underlying fact that we were already headed in that direction.
For that reason, we feel that most businesses will settle on a hybrid approach with a fairly relaxed posture relating to the specific number of in-office hours that are required, which means that Coffee Badging is likely here to stay.
With that in mind, why not embrace it? Next time you send a care package to your remote or hybrid employees, why not send something that quietly acknowledges that you get it?