Months after "coffee badging" was coined, some workers are still using the move to avoid having to work from the office. They're still going to the office; they're just not spending much time there.
First popularized as a term by the videoconferencing company Owl Labs in 2023, coffee badging refers to workers who badge in at the office before going back home to do the bulk of their work.
Workers are swiping their badges to satisfy their return-to-office mandates, showing their faces to the boss and connecting to the company WiFi on their laptops to make it known they were there — before packing it all up again and rushing back home to really do their work.
LinkedIn News recently polled users on the subject. More than 1,500 people responded to the poll in June, and 19% said they're still coffee-badging, 31% said they weren't, and 50% said they'd never done so.
LinkedIn doesn't have a previous poll on the topic to directly compare the results with. But in Owl Labs' State of Hybrid Work survey last year, 58% of hybrid workers polled reported having coffee-badged, another 8% said they hadn't but were interested in trying it, and 34% said they preferred working the full day in the office. The survey, conducted in June 2023, included 2,000 adult full-time workers in the US.
The continued practice of coffee badging highlights the resistance some companies are facing as they attempt to increase office attendance after shifting to hybrid or fully in-person attendance.
Some coffee badgers have said they're more productive or can better manage childcare at home, not to mention their frustrations with time- and money-sucking commutes. Perhaps that's why they feel emboldened to get creative with their card swipes.
Other workers say it's a natural response to employer surveillance methods for enforcing RTO mandates or that it's another example of the productivity theater they feel obliged to perform. While it's not new, performative work has come to the forefront of the debate between remote and in-person work.
While there don't appear to be any widely publicized examples of employees being fired for coffee badging, some companies like Bank of America have started putting employees on notice who haven't fully complied with an office return. Dell, meanwhile, is implementing a color-coded system to grade office attendance for hybrid workers.
There are also signs that companies are cracking down on simulated work. In May, Wells Fargo said it fired multiple employees "after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work."
Are you coffee-badging at work, or do you have another work story to share? Contact this reporter from a nonwork email and device at sjackson@bjinnox.com.
