Fast facts:

• The term coffee badging was popularized in 2023 with the release of a study about hybrid work trends by Owl Labs.
• Coffee badging refers to showing up to the office just to make an appearance and meet hybrid schedule requirements but actually completing the bulk of one’s work at home.
• 58% of respondents to Owl Labs’ 2023 survey partook in coffee badging, while only 19% of respondents to a 2024 poll by LinkedIn said the same.

Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, in-person work had been the norm for office-related occupations since time immemorial. Employers spent tens or hundreds of thousands on office space annually without a second thought, and employees commuted during rush hour twice a day five times a week without too much complaint.

Even as business and communication technologies developed to a point that allowed teams to collaborate between offices thousands of miles apart, in-person work was taken for granted as the default mode of getting things done.

In early 2020, however, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses to shift to a remote working model — an unplanned experiment whose results have dramatically shifted the paradigm of workplace norms.

Employees and managers alike worked from their home WiFi networks, collaborated using Google Docs or Microsoft Office, held meetings on Zoom and Google Meet, and chatted about projects on Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Employees adjusted to remote work, and most found it liberating. Not only did it allow them to keep an eye on kids, pets, and the laundry while getting their jobs done in their pajamas — it also saved them the time, wear-and-tear, and fuel cost of a twice-daily commute.

Frankly, to those who were new to the work-from-home lifestyle, it seemed like a win-win — they saved time and money and achieved a more sustainable work-life balance, and their employer got the same amount of quality work out of them while saving on office costs.

Why would anyone want to go back to the old way of doing things? Weren’t we all glad to have left the crowded, smoggy downtown streets and messy office microwaves behind?

As it turned out, not everyone was on board with the new normal. As vaccines became widely available, and the severity of the pandemic began to wane, employers quickly began reeling their people back into the office like enthusiastic anglers. Enter the era of the hybrid worker.

What is a hybrid workplace or work schedule?

A year or two into the pandemic, many employers began to push for a return to the office, while some employees who had grown accustomed to the work-from-home lifestyle pushed back on these mandates, seeing them as a step backward for workplace culture. Another model then emerged — the hybrid work schedule (see blue line on the graph above).

Hybrid work means attending the office in person some days while working from home on others. Many employers used this strategy in the wake of the pandemic to begin luring their staff back into the office at least some of the time — in some cases priming them for a full return-to-office schedule down the line.

As of 2024, 54% of employees with jobs that can be done entirely remotely work some kind of hybrid schedule, completing some of their work in person at the office and some at home or from another location remotely, according to a Gallup poll.

Not everyone is happy about this, however, and some workers have taken to quietly protesting RTO mandates by honoring them only symbolically via a practice that has been dubbed “coffee badging.”

What does coffee badging mean? How does it work?

Coffee badging refers to showing up to one’s workplace in person for a relatively short time simply to make an appearance before departing after a few short conversations or tasks, then completing the bulk of one’s work at home or elsewhere.

The “coffee” portion of the phrase refers to grabbing a cup of coffee in the office while engaging briefly with one’s manager, coworkers, or whoever happens to be around. The “badging” portion of the phrase refers to the ID badges some workers swipe upon entry to their office so that their attendance can be tracked by their company’s HR software.

Of course, not all workplaces use ID badges, but the takeaway is the same — if you show up to the office to attend a meeting or pass something off to a manager or colleague simply to meet the requirements of your hybrid schedule or return-to-office mandate, but you actually prefer to complete the bulk of your meaningful work at home, you might be a coffee badger — and you’re not alone.

Where did the term coffee badging come from?

Owl Labs, a tech company that manufactures 360-degree microphone and camera devices used for remote workplace collaboration, coined the term in 2023 in the results of a study it conducted about hybrid work titled “The State of Hybrid Work 2023.”

In addition to the coffee badging statistic, the study also found that a quarter of workers would sacrifice 15% of their pay for more flexible working hours and that 69% believed that return-to-office mandates by employers stem from so-called “traditional work expectations” rather than any real measurable benefit.

How common is coffee badging?

58% of hybrid workers surveyed by Owl Labs in 2023 said they engaged in coffee badging (i.e., attended the office simply to “show face”). Only 19% of respondents to a smaller poll on LinkedIn in June 2024 said that they still partake in the practice, however.

How common the practice actually is likely varies between workplaces depending on the specifics of each company’s return-to-office mandates or hybrid work policies and how strictly they are enforced.

The reason behind the trend, however, seems obvious — many newly hybrid workers don’t agree with corporate leadership about the importance of office-based work and feel that they are more productive at home.

But who is correct? Do the benefits of in-person work actually outweigh the costs and inconveniences that come with it for both businesses and employees?

Employers vs. employees on hybrid work

Corporate executives, in many cases, want to go back to the way things were before the pandemic. David Morel, a Forbes contributor and the CEO of a recruitment company, echoed the sentiments of many modern business leaders in an opinion piece about coffee badging, saying “Things have to settle down if businesses are going to continue to make a strong profit post pandemic and to ensure we don’t end up with a load of empty offices in prime real estate spots.”

Coffee badging — and the sentiment from which it seems to stem — highlights the stark contrast between the priorities of certain business leaders and the priorities of some of their most valuable assets — their employees.

Why are corporate executives worried about empty offices? Why not get rid of the office and save some money? Does the office actually contribute to the business’s goals in any meaningful way, or is it just a sunk cost?

If employees get their best work from home, shouldn’t increased flexibility be a priority?

Data about the efficacy of hybrid and remote work models is young, but it’s fairly abundant, and much of it seems to bolster the dominant employee perspective — that flexible work models are a good thing, and clinging to tradition for tradition’s sake may not be as beneficial for businesses as some executives think.

Hybrid work statistics

Here’s just a little bit of what’s been learned about hybrid work via polls and surveys by various companies and data collection firms:

According to Gallup, 60% of remote-capable employees expect and prefer to have a hybrid work schedule by June 2025. Gallup also reported that, as of 2024 hybrid workers have the highest level of engagement compared to fully remote and fully on-site employees (see line graph above).

A 2020 report by PwC claimed that 83% of polled employers said that their transitions to remote work were “effective,” while a 2021 report by McKinsey saw 58% of respondents claim that individual productivity improved or significantly improved during the pandemic-era shift toward remote work.

A 2022 report by Accenture claimed that 63% of organizations with positive growth have enabled flexible, “productivity-anywhere” work models for employees, while 69% of companies with negative or neutral growth prefer fully onsite or fully remote work models. 83% of workers surveyed said that they considered a hybrid or flexible model ideal.

A 2024 survey of 756 business leaders by Resume Builder revealed that half of the respondent companies already require their employees to come to the office four or five days a week, and that 70% of these companies plan to increase or maintain their in-office requirements in 2025 — all of this despite the fact that 80% claim to have lost valuable talent due to their return-to-office policies in the wake of the pandemic.

The takeaway

Every workplace is different, but the pandemic showed us that plenty of our jobs can be done from home — or anywhere with an internet connection, for that matter. That being said, certain employees and teams can no doubt benefit from the collaboration that comes from in-person gatherings.

Coffee badging, however, is just the latest in a string of corporate buzzwords (like “quiet quitting”) that contribute to the ongoing tug-of-war between business leaders who want more employees in the office more often and hybrid and remote workers who want to spend more of their work time at home.

As more of Gen Z enters the workforce and more of the Baby Boomer generation retires, the debate carries on. Since 2022, however, hybrid models (for jobs that can be performed remotely) have outnumbered both fully in-person and fully remote work by a significant margin, according to Gallup.

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This story was originally published July 11, 2024, 1:04 PM.