How to tackle 'coffee badging'
"I'm just here for the hot tap"
Ooooh we’ve got a fun new name for a work trend! Expect multiple thinkpieces and radio discussions ahead, because, as we all know, if you can give a work-related behaviour a catchy term to label it, you’ve nailed it. You have started a conversation, captured a moment, defined a generation… regardless of if said behaviour has been around forever or is really not very common.
Anyway, today’s work term is ‘coffee badging’. It’s a trend named by Owl Labs, who declared in their State Of Hybrid Work report that more than half (58%) of hybrid (meaning working both from home and in the office) employees ‘coffee badge’. What is coffee badging? Simple: it’s the act of going into the office just to tick off the box that says you’ve been there. You might appear just for the morning meeting, then head back home, or you’ll show your face in the kitchen (perhaps grabbing a coffee, hence the name) and then tell people you’ve got a bunch of external meetings so you can’t stick around for long. And off home you go.
When I mentioned the coffee badging trend in my office, a lot of my colleagues refused to believe that anyone was actually doing this. But then, when the instant hot water tap was broken for a few days, I heard multiple people joking that they were only in the office for the endless cups of tea (I made the same joke, because I am very funny). It’s a good sign that for me and others, this was a genuine joke and not the truth of why we were there - and that the coffee badging phenomenon has not hit my particular workplace.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening in the wider world of work, though. And to that reality, I have to say duh or perhaps the even more brutal doy! Of course people will coffee badge if workplaces enforce ‘in the office’ mandates; whether these are just for X days a week or full-time. That is, of course people will coffee badge if workplaces enforce these mandates and fail to do something else: create a genuine need or desire for workers to be there.
Coffee badging is a ‘fuck you’. It’s a ‘if we’re playing a game with stupid rules, fine, I’ll play it even more stupidly’. Coffee badging is saying ‘you know there’s no reason for me to be here, you also know that I don’t want to be here, so this is what you get’.
To prevent coffee badging becoming a thing in an office, employers really don’t have to do anything too out-there. They just need to consider why exactly it’s beneficial for people to come into the office. If it’s not obvious why, then they’ll need to make the office a desirable place to be.
So, let’s break it down. When you’re asking employees to come into the office… why? What benefits do they gain?
It’s all too easy for bosses to roll out empty platitudes about increased productivity or everyone being together, then it’s even easier for workers to see right through it. The reality is that very often, we are not more productive in the office. There’s noise, distraction, pointless meetings; all obstacles to deep work. And often there’s not a sense of togetherness - I hear from so many people that they go in the office only to have everyone doing separate Zoom meetings on their laptops.
Move past the surface-level needs for productivity and togetherness, and go a little deeper. The benefits of being in the office are real! They do exist! You just need to find them, and emphasise them.
So, perhaps your workplace is like my workplace, where silently immersing yourself in one job is trickier when you’re in the office… but idea generation is far, far easier. When I go into the office two days a week, I know that I’m going to have those non-scheduled, off-the-cuff conversations with coworkers that spark tens of ideas for articles, series, content strands. I also know that our meetings will flow far better when they’re in real-life; we’ll interject and expand on other people’s points without the fumble for the unmute button, someone will bring in a printout of a plan and the visuals will just click in a way they don’t when someone’s sharing their screen and pointing at a tiny version you have to squint at.
When I’m in the office, I also get genuine socialising opportunities. I see people who I never talk to on Slack and we they compliment my dress and I say their giant scrunchie is cool and we have an in-depth chat about hair accessories and how wearing a hat for the first time always feels like a life-altering risk.
It’s far easier to be a manager IRL. I don’t care how easy it is to ‘huddle’ on Slack or that you can do voice notes now - it’s still better to be able to just ask someone a question across desks. In-person catchups with people you manage are always, always better than ones conducted over a screen, where it’s easy to hide your tiredness or stress level as long as you’re on camera. Face to face, you notice things you otherwise wouldn’t. It helps to be able to check in and see each other outside of scheduled moments, to notice that someone has their head in their hands in a moment of stress and be able to ask how you can help, because if you were each at home they would likely view this moment as not worth mentioning.
So, those are examples of benefits to being in the office. And requests for us to be in the office on certain days a week have succeeded (and avoided tactics like coffee badging) because managers have focused in on that. It is far more convincing for an employer to explain that you need to be in the office so you can have better meetings, and come up with ideas, and connect with your team, than for them to say something vague about needing to be in the office because of productivity.
That focus could go further. What if, for example, these in-office days were explicity designed to be for idea generation, manager catchups, and socialising? How about if we gave up on trying to do the tasks that are better at home (deep editing/writing work, sorting invoices, conducting Teams interviews with external people), where it’s quiet and private, in the office? We could have a think about which meetings are better in the office and which are fine to do online, and keep each type to its respective physical space, so you that every time you’ve got a meeting in the office, you know exactly why it’s going to be better to go in rather than staying home. We could specify that between 2pm and 4pm in the office, none of us are noodling around on our laptops but instead having a freeflowing chat about whatever comes up.
It’s all about making the need to be in the office so obvious and in your face that everyone can see it. It’s also about acknowledging that some tasks will be better done remotely, and adapting our hybrid approaches to this. No square pegs in round holes. Keep better-from-home tasks at home, and in-office days explicitly and only for better-in-office things.
The tricky thing is that in some jobs, those benefits won’t be clear… perhaps because they don’t exist. There will be jobs when there is truly no benefit (for the workers, at least) to being in the office. If you’re a boss in this type of work, and you still want to make people return to the office (I get it! You’re renting the building and don’t want money to go to waste! Or you like being able to ‘see’ how hard everyone’s working. Or you’ve got old-fashioned views about what work should look like and you can’t quite let go), the solution is simple: if you can’t show a need to be in the office, you can instead create a desire.
That means the fanciest coffee machine you can imagine. Pizza for lunch. Super fast wifi and fancy desktop Macs. Ergonomic chairs that feel like you’re floating in a cloud. Cool artwork on the walls. The best selection of teas you’ve ever seen (if there’s no jasmine green and assam black, you’re in trouble). Bring on the perks!
In short, if the purpose of bringing people into the office is just presenteeism (no judgment!), coffee badging is going to happen. People will game the system. So game it back. Embrace the coffee badging, but make the coffee good enough to not only lure them in, but keep them there all day. If there’s no need for workers to be in the office, bosses need to make them want to be there. The office needs to be a space that’s better than their own homes (and considering the state of renting in London at the moment, this really isn’t a hard ask).
Having a genuine need for in-office time and showing it is the ideal. If that’s not possible, go for the option of creating a want. If your workplace can’t do either, you will find people doing whatever they can to game the system, ticks the boxes, get their coffee badge, all to signal that none of this makes any sense. Resentment will build and at first it might be shown in these small acts of tiny rebellion (you know what, if I’m being forced to be in the office for no reason, I will steal extra slices of bread from the canteen), then through quiet quitting and bare minimum mondays, and then, finally, it will arrive in the form of losing great, talented people and struggling to attract new ones.
Send me your work woes
A reminder that I’m starting an advice column on this Substack all about the world of work.
If you have a work woe of any kind, please email workingonpurposenews@gmail.com and I’ll do my best to solve it, asking additional experts for their wisdom when needed.
Work-related reading recs:
I read this on Apple News, lost the link, and now can only find the article on Harpers Bazaar India. If anyone has the original link pls send it to me! Anyway, it’s this great article by Amanda Montell about how therapy-speak has taken over the workplace
I love this article about how corporate cliches are more damaging than just being deeply irritating
Best podcasts about careers (yes, Eat Sleep Work Repeat is on here)
Again, another Apple News + one, sorry! But great piece on how to stop non-stop thinking about work
“The office needs to be a space that’s better than their own homes (and considering the state of renting in London at the moment, this really isn’t a hard ask).”
This has been borne out in my life lately. I spent 18 months of mandatory WFH creating a work space in my flat which was significantly better than the immediate pre pandemic hot-desking situation (if not the 2018 office where I had my own desk with a vertical board I could pin fun stuff up on and leave my phone chargers plugged in) and as a result in the 2 years since then I barely went back into the office. Despite living a 15 minute walk away, the office wasn’t that great a place to be and mostly my direct colleagues weren’t there anyway.
BUT I have now moved to the other end of the country where my local office (of the same organisation) has recently been zhuzhed up (although not always in a way that makes it easy to get work done...). But the secret sauce of why I go in four days a week: I haven’t set up a desk and monitor in my new flat. And as part of that - I’ve realised that 80/20 is way easier than 40/60 or 60/60 because it means I know what I’m doing and don’t have to spent mental energy on figuring out where I am on any given day.