Workplace lifestyle: coffee badging, part 1

Self-tutoring about trends in working life: the tutor mentions coffee badging.

Apparently, coffee badging means showing up to the office long enough to enjoy a coffee, then heading back out to work the rest of the day from home. The “badging” part seems to come from scanning one’s badge to enter the work facility: that way, there’s evidence you’ve been there.

Coffee badging is mainly a thing, it seems, where management is pushing for employees to return to working at the office rather than from home. While working from home had started earlier than COVID, it seems that during COVID, many employees got into the habit of working from home, which they came to like very much. They didn’t necessarily assume that, afterwards, they’d be expected back in the office.

Coffee badging is the result of many things, one being the fact that many employees who came to like working from home saw it as a permanent change, at least for them. Perhaps management, on the other hand, more often saw it as temporary. Yet, once a change is made to something people like better, it can be very hard to change back, even if the change was defined as strictly temporary. During the COVID era, so many decisions had to be made quickly, and COVID seemed so immense, that perhaps many managers and workers alike just couldn’t see past it. Therefore, even more confusingly for the workers, a return to work at the office after COVID might not have been prescribed by management, or even imagined. In the vacuum of the unknown, some workers self-defined their new normal. Apparently, where one can end up nowadays, with COVID seemingly in the rear-view mirror, is compromise: things go somewhat back to the way they were, but not totally.

The reason(s) management might want people to return to work at the office, why people prefer working from home, and why coffee badging might be an unlikely compromise, long-term, all seem like good material for future posts:)

Source:

tech.co