6mo ago

Workers are coffee badging to get around return-to-office mandates. What is it?

www.usatoday.com

Antiwork @lemmy.world

HiddenLayer555 @lemmy.ml

6mo ago

Workers are coffee badging to get around return-to-office mandates. What is it?

www.usatoday.com /story/money/2025/01/21/coffee-badging-employees-avoid-office-mandates/77731723007/

12 comments

Many are “coffee badging,” or swiping their ID badges at the office to record their arrival, staying 30 minutes or so ‒ long enough to greet colleagues and grab a cup of coffee – and then heading back home.
- Eeeeeh!
  Write spoiler alert
  Wasn't going onto MSM and reading the article
  nvm
It's so weird. 5 years ago there were endless stories from all the big companies that said they got big productivity gains with work from home.
- But they realised that all these massively expensive office buildings are mostly empty now.
  
  Can't let all that "valuable" real estate loose value and cause an economic crisis because commercial real estate plummeted in value. No sir! Money and human suffering must go up!
- As far as I'm aware, they often use these return-to-office mandates to piss workers off, so that those quit on their own, without severance pay or legal troubles (in countries with worker protections).
Coffee badger don't care
- For the uninitiated.
With the forced return to office, your time is wasted on getting yourself presentable in the morning and then commuting to and from the office. This should be considered part of your working hours if being physically present adds so much value, employers would pay that cost. In reality no employers would do this, as they know being in the office isn’t worth 2 hours of your working hours.
My employer accidentally gave me two laptops. So technically I’m signed in to the network daily even on weekends. In reality I go weeks at times without going to the office. My productivity has not suffered at all.
Dystopia. Is this really common in the U.S? Both RTO-mandates and this "coffee badging" as a way to get around it? My company in a different country has a policy of 50% WFH, but nobody cares and I sit at home the majority of the days. Here it seems like WFH is here to stay.
- The bigger the company, the more likely it is true. It's a combination of narcissistic bosses and companies wanting to justify their real-estate purchases. Smaller companies tend to function just like you described instead however.

12 comments