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- ☕ coffee badging: your team's silent rebellion
☕ coffee badging: your team's silent rebellion
and what it reveals about your workplace culture
In partnership with
Howdy HR friends!👋
The weekend is so close we can almost taste it?!
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Let’s jump in to today’s topic shall we?
🚦Coming up
In today’s edition
🏢 The Rise of Coffee Badging: What HR Needs to Know About This Growing Workplace Trend
🛋️ The Break Room: How is your organization handling employees who "coffee badge" in the office?
📚 Human Readsources: Job market softening trends, rehiring boomerang employees, and AI's impact on workforce reduction
💭Opening thoughts
Time to wake up and smell the coffee (badging)?
I’ll take my cappuccino to go (home).
Are your employees among the 60% of hybrid workers who admit to "coffee badging": showing up, swiping in, grabbing coffee, and then quietly disappearing for the day?
This growing trend signals a fundamental misalignment between workplace policies and employee needs, potentially undermining productivity, collaboration, and your carefully crafted return-to-office strategy.
As HR leaders,it’s up to us to recognize this behavior not as defiance to manage, but as valuable feedback about flexibility gaps, outdated policies, and possible weaknesses in your workplace value proposition.
Discover how to transform coffee badging from a management headache into an opportunity to build a more engaging, productive workplace.
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🧠Let’s unpick
🏢 The Rise of Coffee Badging: What HR Needs to Know
This trend highlights the growing tension between organizational desires for in-person work and employee preferences for flexibility.
It also reveals deeper issues about trust, productivity measurement, and workplace culture.
A staggering 58-60% of hybrid workers admit to coffee badging, and research shows 69% of employees would look for a new job if forced to spend more time in the office.
So this isn't just about employees trying to game the system—it's about a fundamental shift in how people view work and where it happens.
As we explored in our recent Spotify edition: work is not a place you go, it’s something you do.
The proximity bias that rewards visible presence over actual productivity is creating a counterproductive dynamic in many workplaces.
Instead of cracking down with surveillance or stricter policies, consider addressing the root causes.
Focus on measuring performance by results rather than physical presence, create compelling reasons for office attendance through better collaboration spaces, and adopt a collaborative approach to hybrid work policies.
Most importantly, have candid conversations with your team about what makes them productive and what would make office time genuinely valuable—not just a box to check.
Or just start serving really bad coffee in the break room. It’s up to you 😀
You can read more at...
👀Too long didn’t read
TLDR
Coffee badging isn't just employee rebellion—it's a wake-up call to rethink how we measure productivity and create meaningful in-office experiences.
Focus on results over physical presence and make the office somewhere people want to be, not somewhere they're forced to check in.
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Takeaway and try
📊 Run an anonymous pulse survey asking "What would make coming to the office valuable for you?" instead of tracking badge-ins, then use this data to redesign your office experience around what employees actually want.
🤝 Schedule team workshops to collaboratively design your hybrid policy, giving employees ownership in the process and addressing their specific needs for flexibility and productivity.
🏆 Shift performance metrics away from office presence to focus on outcomes and deliverables, making it clear to managers that results matter more than where work happens.
🛋️ Invest in creating compelling collaboration spaces that offer experiences employees can't get at home, like advanced tech for hybrid meetings or comfortable social areas that foster genuine connection.
🗣️ Host honest conversations about proximity bias in your leadership team, developing strategies to ensure remote workers receive equal recognition and advancement opportunities as their in-office colleagues.
☕The break room
What’s your take?
📚Additional reading
Human Readsources
💼 Job Market Cools as Candidates Receive Fewer Offers (HR Dive) - Job candidates receiving fewer offers as labor market softens
🪃 Boomerang Employees Surge as Cautious Hiring Dominates (HR Grapevine) - Boomerang employees represent one-third of new hires amid cautious recruitment.
🤖 Amazon CEO: AI Will Cut Jobs, Transform Roles (HR Dive) - Amazon CEO: AI will reduce workforce, transform company operations.
That’s it for today.
Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠
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