Coffee Badging – How Can Businesses Make it a Positive Trend?
Do you have one of those hybrid jobs where you balance your time between working from home and venturing into the office for those mandatory office hours? Well, now there’s a new trend hitting the workplace according to a recent survey by Owl Labs. It’s called Coffee Badging! But what is coffee badging and how does it work?
How can it work in your favour?
Let’s break it down for you.
Quite simply, it involves arriving at work, swiping in, and then enjoying a coffee with the team.
Essentially, you swipe in, have a coffee, and job done! You have fulfilled that mandatory office visit. But let’s not get carried away. Waltzing in, having a coffee and a chat and leaving again is only going to wash once or twice before someone clocks what you are up to. Let’s take a look at how coffee badging could work for the employer and employee.
There are many benefits of coffee badging for the employee including:
- A way to catch up on all the office gossip (that’s the fun part done)
- An integration back into office life after months/years of working remotely
- Feel like part of a team rather than missing out while working from home
- Enjoy the sense of teamwork
- Have all the tools on hand to do the job – printer, stationery etc
- Fulfill your office hours without it seeming like a mundane chore or an effort to leave the house
You get to catch up on all the office gossip, socialise with your colleagues, find out what’s going on, and then go back to the comfort of your home (and your pyjamas). Yes, you have to work but that’s what you get paid for!
And the benefits for the employer?
After such an uncertain and unsettling period of time – first the pandemic and then the aftermath, coffee badging could be seen as a good thing – a way to ease employees back into the office to encourage them to socialise (a little) with their colleagues and give them that sense of FOMO. Being part of an office culture and being kept in the loop while not being alone at home… it has so many benefits:
- Employees feel part of a team
- You see what your employees are doing and get to catch up with them
- Increased productivity through teamwork
- A sense of camaraderie
- Easier to communicate
One thing though – you better have great coffee!
Employers be warned though “People don’t want to spend time and money on frequent office pilgrimages if they’re just going to be sitting on the same video calls they’d be doing in the comfort of their own homes or on tasks that they feel less productive doing from the office,” said Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs.
Consider how you can make your office an attractive, stress-free environment where people want to come. What can you do to differentiate that time in the office from what they could do from home? How can you make it a positive experience where they want to keep coming back to work and not just for the coffee?
The downsides of coffee badging
The only way that this new trend is going to work before the coffee machine is unplugged though is through trust understanding and mutual respect between employee and employer. Let’s consider the downsides of coffee badging:
- A lack of trust develops between the employer and the employee
- Employees feel that office work is a mandatory task and the only way through it is to coffee badge
- Disdain from office workers who see it as a form of showing off and taking advantage
- Disruption to the working day with people coming and going for a social chat
- A decrease in productivity
- A feeling of negativity around going into the office
Let’s be smart people – while it may be the latest trend in hybrid working, you still have a job to do or a business to run.
Fact – 58% of office workers have admitted to coffee badging (Owl Labs survey, June 23). What’s more, those who don’t do it, or haven’t thought of it yet have admitted they wouldn’t be averse to trying it!
