Want to Beat Your Return-to-Office Mandate? Try ‘Coffee Badging’ at Your Own Risk
A cup of coffee in the majors is the term for a short baseball career in the big leagues. Now some white-collar workers are leaving the office almost as soon as they arrive and calling the practice “coffee badging." The difference is the ballplayer wishes he could stay; the people ditching their desks would rather not show up in the first place. We’ve entered the gamesmanship phase of the return-to-office battle between bosses and their subordinates.
Instead of ignoring in-person mandates, as many people did when enforcement was lax, some are finding ways to follow the letter, but not the spirit. They’re going in on days when most co-workers don’t, taking off early and creating afternoon dead zones or, in the extreme, barely clocking in at all. Many companies’ policies require employees to work a certain number of days in person without specifying the hours.
People can make brief appearances, long enough to be seen by execs and satisfy heightened monitoring, then bolt. It’s the grown-up version of signing a professor’s attendance sheet before ducking out of the lecture hall (not that I ever did that). Coffee badging seems like a way to hack the RTO system but there are flaws, not the least of which is the term’s fuzzy etymology.
Urban Dictionary says the badge in the name is the building-access card that a worker uses to swipe into the office just long enough to sip a mug of joe; others say that’s too literal and claim the badge is actually an imaginary award for showing face—like a Boy Scout merit badge pinned in the boss’s mind instead of on a sash. Never trust your professional fate to a buzzword. Remember how quiet quitting soon became quiet firing? Just because everybody else is doing it doesn’t mean there won’t be
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