Good morning! I hope the world is being good to you and you’re being good to it.

Grab your coffee or beverage of choice and share a thought with me!

Thanks to my daily email from Merriam-Webster, I now know about “coffee badging”.

Coffee Badging
noun

Refers to the act or practice of working on-site for a short, perfunctory amount of time, and then returning to work from home. Coffee badge is also used as a verb.

I’m glad this practice has a name.

As terrible as COVID was in 2020, one of the positives coming out of that, for me, was the ability to work fully remote. I’ve always been a proponent of it, observing the freedom and efficacy with which my dad retained a corporate job while working from home. Growing up, I never thought much of it since that is how he had to conduct business, but as an adult, I quickly came to appreciate the inherent benefits. So when my colleagues and I were forced to adapt and work from home, I welcomed the opportunity with a warm embrace.

To be blunt, there are a lot of people in positions of power making stupid decisions, and an observable trend of return to office (RTO) mandates is one them. These policies are often done in the name of productivity and culture, and while I can poke holes in that logic and share from my own experiences, we’re just here to sip our coffees and share in some brief conversation before allowing the rest of the world to take over. We can simply consider RTO as the ill-begotten policy of control mongers and the unadaptable.

This is why “coffee badging” warms my jaded heart. It emphasizes the innate desire for flexibility and the obstacles people will overcome (or work around) to undermine a foolish policy. Come to the office, swipe the badge to confirm attendance, putz around for a bit (likely talking to others in the office without any true productivity occurring), and then waste more time returning home. The thing is, even with all that “unproductive” time, people are still likely getting their stuff done and then some. Efficacy can be compressed but is less likely to be maintained when stretched, hence the built-in fallacy of a productive 8-hour work day. When I managed a team, I empowered the team members to figure out how to best utilize their time to get done what they needed to get done. I didn’t need everything filled in from margin to margin; that ends up being wasteful effort anyway. And you know what, the individuals thrived and the team did as well.

I talked about coffee badging with a former colleague only a couple days prior, but we did not have an official name for it. This makes the timing of Merriam-Webster’s email amusing (someone, or something, is listening…). It also shows a countering trend to those pesky RTO mandates. Sure, make us come into the office, but we will not go quietly into the night. Take my badge and swipe it up your…card reader.

Have a pleasant day.