Coffee Badging: Turning Up, Topping Up, and F’ing Off
Once upon a time, hybrid working meant flexibility. Autonomy. The joy of doing your morning meeting in joggers, with a home made flat white in hand and a dog asleep at your feet. But then management got twitchy. “We’d love to see more of you in the office,” they said. Enter: coffee badging, the passive-aggressive loophole.
In short? You show up, swipe your badge, nod to the boss, grab a latte... and vanish before anyone notices you’ve taken the last oat milk.
So What Is Coffee Badging?
If you've ever commuted for 40 minutes only to sit down, open Slack, and immediately start planning your exit strategy, congratulations, you've already been coffee badging.
The term describes the increasingly common behaviour of popping into the office just long enough to get your attendance badge ticked (literally or figuratively), make a bit of small talk, and then retreat to your natural habitat: your home desk, kitchen table, or favourite coffee shop with decent Wi-Fi and a working plug socket.
It’s part compliance, part performance art.
Why It’s Catching On
Nobody really wants to be in the office five days a week anymore. Employers are pushing for ‘increased visibility’, but many workers have realised that productivity doesn’t magically increase just because you’re near a sad potted plant and Dave from Finance, not to mention the money you’ve been saving by not commuting.
So coffee badging becomes the compromise. You’re there. Technically. You even smiled at someone in HR. What more do they want?
The Unspoken Etiquette of the Badge-and-Dash
There’s a subtle art to doing this well:
Timing is everything: Too early and the place is empty. Too late and you risk getting dragged into a stand-up. The sweet spot is 9:45am, peak ‘Oh hi, I was just grabbing a coffee!’ territory.
Props are key: Holding a hot drink and a lanyard says, “I belong here,” even if your brain is already halfway home. Bonus points if your reusable cup has your name on it.
Exit strategy: You must leave before someone books you into a spontaneous brainstorm. Set a fake calendar block. Pretend your Wi-Fi is dodgy. Mumble something about needing “deep focus time.”
Is It Bad? Is It Brilliant?
That depends who you ask.
For workers, it’s a harmless way of ticking the “in-person” box without derailing your entire week. For managers, it’s a passive protest.
But let’s be honest, if the only thing dragging people into the office is free bean-to-cup coffee and passive pressure, maybe the issue isn’t the employees. Maybe it’s the beige meeting rooms.
The general consensus
Coffee badging isn’t about being lazy. It’s about autonomy. It’s a coffee smelling middle finger to outdated expectations.
You showed up. You caffeinated. You left.
We salute you.
