I Found Out My Coworker Was Coffee Badging For Six Months And I Never Noticed

A mate of mine who works in finance told me the other day over a beer, deadpan.

“Yeah, I’m coffee badging it tomorrow.”

No idea what it was, felt stupid but asked him.

Turns out it’s fairly literally exactly what it sounds like.

You badge into the office, so it logs you in whatever attendance system they have to check against whatever mandate, go get a coffee, sit at your desk for about 45 minutes, then leave and work from home for the rest of the day.

You did the checkin required by whatever hybrid policy the business is rolling out.

You didn’t actually do 8 hours of the day though.

After it was in my head the more you looked the shape of it became… ubiquitous.

For the next couple of weeks almost every workplace conversation that came up had this concept tucked inside it somehow.

It was becoming widespread enough that it had its own name, which invariably signifies enough independent people discovered the same loophole independently and noone even got together to compare notes.

This isn't people being lazy. This is a very precise response to a very precise form of rule

So the surprising thing, once I dug around on it a bit, is how un-lazy it isn’t.

This isn’t people just chucking a sicky for the day.

Most the stories I heard were about people who still genuinely get shit done just… not at their desk for 8 solid hours a day.

This is born out of a specific type of management rule, ie the one saying they need you to be in the building X times a week for no specified reason beyond vague "culture" and "energy" etc etc, but says nothing at all about what any of those X days of presence should look like.

No hours.

No required output.

Just data points.

Coffee badging is basically what happens when the metric you have is how many bodies are in the building, and the rule is that bodies in the building require bodies to check into a box for 5 minutes every day they intend to fulfil the requirement.

When a measurement is put in place which doesn’t match the underlying intent of the policy, and that measurement is easy for people to manipulate against the original intent you’re going to get this.

It is not necessarily any attempt at revolution.

Just the human being reading the regulation literally and not in the way the author intended because only the literal regulation is being tracked.

The badge data that people think is valuable actually is’t and we’re not reading it right.

Ok so this part i think is genuinely kind of fascinating, if i’m honest with myself.

A lot of companies that are driving return to work policies are all up in badge swipe data, attendance up attendance up attendance up, that means the policies work.

And then there’s a percentage of the attendance being the coffee badger that goes home after forty minutes.

The data is going to read the exact same number as everyone who is in all day doing collaboration, all working from spreadsheets up high in data reporting for middle managers all the company and in a lot of companies I guarantee the dashboard and reporting can’t distinguish between them.

So you end up with a policy that works 100% on paper/spreadsheets based on one single measurement that is supposed to represent something that no actually working on it actually ever represented because nobody ever checks that actually there’s no actual difference because all you have is badges.

The data you have proves the policy succeeded by a numerical count, even though it didn’t.

why wasn’t it coffee badges 5 years ago

There’s a surprisingly simple explanation that it only really exploded into something big enough to warrant its own name, and it’s not because employees magically got more lazy, or because there was no sense of commitment.

Most of these employees have actually had two or three years fully in remote, had entire systems built around not doing that, have had many years proves to themselves that that they do still get it done, without needing any of the reasons companies use now for people to be in.

You just can’t just undo that, at least not without a fully satisfactory reason.

And what happens to rule when it does doesn’t make sense to the person applying and when someone is forced to obey it is that people always pay only as much regard to it as possible because there is just literally no explanation from the employer why any other option can possibly be seen as superior.

You see this everywhere even with more minor rule breaches.

For the remote and returning the only really option to obey this policy was to come back into the building 4 days a week and be expected to achieve something there that most of them just don’t believe warrants it in reality. They may just not have voiced it aloud but that doesn’t mean it isnt true that we have come to some consensus about the fact, which just causes them to perform whatever level of work they are mandated to carry out and nothing else.

And since I have had many an experience myself writing or reporting and seeing the most important thing for a line manager about how far I had gotten on reports was attendance rather than anything else that can actually tell whether or not you are doing well at a work task, which we all, as employees know is the one metric you should actually really be focusing on to ensure employees carry out the required work.

This isn't necessarily about bad management, it is probably quite debatable as to whether people even 'need' to be in, for any amount of reason, and people of all backgrounds and roles could reasonably argue it either way for different types of business and roles within those business, but the companies who have implemented this have seen and created their own problem by pushing out a specific metric and not looking at what that metric is actually measuring on a wider level.

The companies that appear to be circumventing this issues are companies that have moved the entire concept away from counting heads against time to actually focus on outcomes and results rather than simply how many of the heads are physically present in the building, for some number of time which may well not involve actual work.

Again, much harder to measure outcomes but perhaps it’s closer to what the original premise of these policies intended?

You never can quite tell… and my mate did confirm his mate and half his team were also doing it at the finance firm where he works.

It is, he told me laughing “all you can do, really.

As long as the work gets done”.

Which seems like entirely reasonable, and efficient use of company resources as per the spirit of a return to work.

Not, obviously, the letter.