The new “coffee badge” career trend has some business leaders on high alert

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By Erica Lamberg, Fox Business

In post-pandemic times, many employers and companies continue to enforce the return of their employees to the office — and some employees are responding with a certain form of resistance.

First, there was the “quiet quit” trend, in which workers do minimal work just to get by — and now, workplace leaders and experts say, there is “coffee badging,” another form of employee protest.

Read on to learn about this employment trend, how it’s impacting offices across the country and what actions you can take in response.

What is a “coffee badge”?

Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs in Boston, told FOX Business that while some employees are being called back to the office, many are subtly protesting by returning to the office for as little time as possible.

“Coffee badging is done when employees come into the office long enough to have a cup of coffee, show their face and get to ‘pass the badge’ — and then go home to do the rest of their work,” Weishaupt said.

His company, Owl Labs, which makes 360-degree video conferencing devices, dug deep into the data for this trend.

“Our State of Hybrid Work 2023 report found that only about 1 in 5 employees (22%) want to remain in the office full-time, with 37% wanting hybrid work options and 41% preferring to work fully remote,” Weizhaupt said.

Furthermore, he said the Owl Labs study found that more than half (58%) of hybrid workers are “coffee badged,” while another 8% said they didn’t do so yet but would like to try it.

How do workers escape the “coffee badge”?

People at all levels of companies and organizations are busy with their own jobs, so they don’t have time to monitor everyone else’s whereabouts, Weishaupt said.

“If a coffee badger doesn’t have any in-person meetings or an office near his boss, that person may not miss him,” he said.

He also said: “Our data shows that around two-thirds of managers (64%) have a coffee badge themselves, while another 6% would like to try it.”

“Less than a third of managers (30%) want to go into the office for a full day.”

Why is this trend emerging now?

Nikki Jorgensen, managing director of customer execution at Insperity in Denver, told FOX Business that several months ago, coffee badges started making the news as the latest trend in the business.

“The coffee badge is simply the latest example of the challenges companies face in bringing employees back to the office post-pandemic,” she said.

How can companies address this?

Jorgensen suggested that it is important for each company to do its own research on coffee badges.

“There’s no need to panic about the coffee hype, but if a company finds that most of their employees carry a coffee badge, it may reflect a need to re-evaluate their organization’s culture and work-from-home policies,” she told FOX Business.

Often, but not always, coffee badges are a reflection of employee dissatisfaction with the organization’s culture or mix-and-match policies, Jorgensen said.

“A coffee badge may seem disrespectful or even disobedient to business leaders who expect their employees to spend the entire day in the office,” she said.

“It’s important to understand that the motives behind a coffee badge are rarely in bad faith,” she explained.

“In many cases, employees adopt the coffee badge because they want to improve their work-life balance.”

Three reforms to consider

Company managers may want to focus on some strategies to stop coffee badging among employees, Jorgensen said.

Implement flexible hours. “To encourage employees to spend more time in the office, consider flexible hours so they can come in an hour earlier or an hour later,” she said.

Encourage employees to come together. employees Wants Jorgensen said to socialize with each other. Given this, “leaders can create opportunities for employees to socialize by planning events during lunch or immediately after work hours,” she says.

Embrace open communication. Jorgensen suggested that the coffee badge could be a symptom of employees who are tired, exhausted, and disengaged at work.

“To combat it, invite employees to talk about their workplace experiences and share solutions to help them balance their work and personal lives more easily,” she said.

When Can a Coffee Badge Hurt Business?

Jorgensen noted that when this practice becomes widespread among employees, the trend can detract from the organizational culture.

“When employees only come into the office briefly and then leave, they don’t spend a lot of time interacting face-to-face,” she told FOX Business.

“Over time, this can undermine relationship building and reduce collaboration.”

Emily Ballesteros, founder of Burnout Management, LLC in Seattle and author of the upcoming book, “The Burnout Cure: How to Find Balance and Reclaim Your Life” (February 2024), told FOX Business that one downside to the trend coffee badge is that it creates an unpredictability that It can affect others.

“Trying to schedule meetings when you’re not sure who will be virtual or in-person; Planning transportation to and from the office; “Needing clarity on whether a meeting is virtual or in-person, etc. — all of this adds more unpredictability to the workday that can cause frustration,” Ballesteros said.

To reduce unpredictability, many companies offer hybrid schedules.

“They’ve seen in surveys that their employees want the flexibility of working from home sometimes,” she said.

“Instead of constant flux and unpredictability of where they are, they create a schedule that meets people in the middle, like saying everyone works from home Monday and Friday and everyone is in the office Tuesday through Thursday,” Ballesteros noted.

“Where there are disruptions, there is usually a need to fulfill them.”