Coffee Badging | A new trend amongst staff being ushered back to the office

It’s no secret that businesses want their employees back in the office. Countless companies have set mandates to ensure in-person work, but this has been met, largely, with dissatisfaction from employees within an organisation.

In response, workers have started to partake in a new trend called ‘coffee badging’, a daily schedule whereby you come into the office for a few hours, making sure to miss the morning’s rush hour, catch-up with colleagues over a coffee, before going home to do productive work.

This routine serves predominantly the purpose of being a ‘tick-box exercise’ where employees can show their manager that they are spending time in the office, fulfilling managerial desires for workers to ditch remote work for more hours in-person.

In this sense, the concept of ‘coffee badging’ can be likened to ideas around presenteeism, as employees feel the need to perform their role in front of their boss to appear as though they are being productive, even though they might not be.