Kya Buller
There’s a very controversial trend sweeping the work world, prompting urgent warnings from experts - and you might be doing it too.
The phenomenon is mainly used by hybrid workers, AKA those of us who get to mix working in an office with working from home.
As a result of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, many workers were forced to adapt to an entirely new way of life that saw us confined to our homes.
Those of us who were lucky enough to remain fit and healthy were introduced to the world of Zoom and virtual meetings - and a lot of people started to love being able to work from home in their pyjamas.
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Enter coffee badging…
David Rice, HR expert at People Managing People, explains: "This is a trend of people turning up to an office where you have to enter through a common area or badge your way into an office space and the company can use that data to determine who has turned up for work and when. Once they've badged in, they then go home to work for most of the day.”
He added: "It's actually not anything new, the only difference is people going home instead of wasting time talking to friends in the office break room and being in meetings where nothing gets done.
“The trend of going home is really just employees fighting back against return to office orders and attempting to make the point that they can be just as effective from home.”
Rice notes that while it’s not just Gen Z that are coffee badging, they have taken the lead on posting about it online.
He explains: "They're just the faces you see on TikTok talking about it and therefore are being credited with something many workers before them were doing five or six years ago, and just not making content about it.
“But if there were some sort of reliable data which shows that were true, I'd say it's likely tied to the fact that a large portion of Gen Z has entered the workforce post-pandemic, when remote work was more of a norm.
"They don't really remember the pre-pandemic days of it being a soft benefit and therefore see return to office orders as a command and control tactic."
Rice warns: "It's bad on a number of levels.
"Eventually, it's going to impact [an employees] level of satisfaction and lead to them looking elsewhere.
"It's also bad from a workplace productivity standpoint, because the time they spend commuting back and forth to put on this attendance charade could just be spent at home, doing work."
He continued: "It's not a good practice to get into and won't go unnoticed for long. For one thing, people don't often badge in and then not again for the rest of the day.
“If it's a big campus they'll likely badge into different areas over the course of a day. If it's a smaller space, they'll likely leave to go to lunch or just to walk around and get outside the confines of the office for a short period. So if you're only badging in one time in the morning, it's a big giveaway and if you're company has strict in office attendance policies, they'll have hard data to use against you to potentially dismiss you.”
"The real value of being in office, whether perceived or the reality, is the interactions you have with co-workers”, Rice says. “If you're wanting to get your in-office time over with, try to stack your meetings around each other and get to them on time and be active in the meetings.”
He concludes: “When you get home, ensure that you're available during work hours and actually getting your work done.
"Just showing up for meetings doesn't satisfy the requirements of your job, make sure your end product is visible and accounted for. That will breed trust that you can handle a flexible working arrangement.”
So, there you have it... coffee badging is probably not a good idea.