Generally, this time of the year is slow across offices around the world, with shorter days, a snappy chill in the air, and decreasing employee presence due to block leaves, and vacations.
Speaking of scarce employee presence, it seems like this year it will be more severe, with the latest bout of coffee badging doing the rounds.
What is coffee badging, did you ask?
Simply put, coffee badging involves employees making brief appearances in the office to ‘be seen’, network with peers, participate in water-cooler/coffee-break conversations, and promptly leave. In doing so, they earn notional ‘coffee badges’, or official accounts of their time spent in office.
Why is it suddenly in the news?
Remember the return-to-work mandates set out by different organizations as the after-effects of COVID-19 started easing? And how there was a public outcry against that by employees who had gotten used to the comfort and advantages of working from home? A series of silent resignations happened, but as the global economic conditions worsened, employees chose to stay put and start returning to the office, grumbling and muttering under their breath.
Well, coffee badging is the latest ingenious ploy of employees trying to optimize their time at the office. Coffee badging helps them strike a balance between following rules set by employers while not compromising on productivity or ceding ground completely – feel the employees.
Is this another rebellion without a cause?
Depends on who you ask.
While employers have their justifications for calling employees back to the office (better collaboration, accountability, team morale, etc.), employees have always been averse to it.
Especially when they found out that they were losing a lot of time, energy, and productivity by making trips to the office which was not adding any value to their overall output or outcome.
Coffee badging is their proverbial ‘bend the rule without breaking it’ response.
And it seems to be working at ringing the alarm bells across office floors.
Employers feel that such behavior by a section of employees will have an adverse effect on the rest of the employees and erode overall collaboration and synergy.
Hence, organizations have started resorting to measures like defining a hybrid model mandating a certain number of hours at the office.
At IDfy, we believe that while setting up and following some guidelines to reduce coffee badging is good, a strict stance might backfire.
The end goal of employees being present at the office is better productivity and outcome, after all. Keeping that in mind, some of the following measures can perhaps be tried out:
- Letting employee groups work from co-working spaces instead of designated offices – would potentially reduce employees’ commute while also ensuring collaboration
- Being flexible with ‘at-office hours’ – instead of a strict 9-5 or 10-6 policy, the proposal could be to spend 8 hours, whenever it is. This can help beat traffic and also plan their workdays better