What is coffee badging? And what are managers doing about it?

As more employers require their workers to return to the office in post-pandemic America, a quiet revolution is taking place.

“Coffee badging,” as it’s known, looks something like this:

An employee shows up at the office in the morning, maybe grabs a cup of coffee, openly schmoozes with co-workers for a little while, and then quietly slips out to work remotely for the rest of the day.

“This is one trick employees are using to protest the end of remote work flexibility and those hybrid schedules,” says KTLA consumer reporter David Lazarus.

This new workplace trend, Lazarus says, is a sly way for employees to check a box while still enjoying the flexibility of working from home -or wherever- as they did through the COVID pandemic.

But managers are getting savvy about this, Lazarus says.

“They’re walking the halls in the afternoons to see who is around, or maybe summoning workers to their office on the fly.”

Lazarus says employees who think this is a clever way to game the system should think again.

“More and more managers are simply rewarding those employees who do come to the office,” he says. “In fact, one recent survey of CEOs found that 90% will give all of the plum assignments only to the workers they see at the office on a regular basis.”