'Coffee Badging' May Not Be Good For Workplaces

People have found a unique way to get around return to office mandates: socialize, mark attendance, leave

- Reem Khokhar

Greater Noida-based Anupam Gupta travels 120km to make a trip to his office in Gurugram and back home. He does the trek twice a week. His organisation, the tech company where he works as a senior pre-sales solution architect, started hybrid working four months ago after a few years of remote working. Though office transportation is provided, the fixed timings do not match Gupta’s since his schedule is dependent on interactions with international clients. He ends up making enough of an appearance on office days to mark his presence, grab coffee or lunch with colleagues, and leave to do most of his work at home.

Gupta’s reluctant presence in the office is echoed by some employees in reaction to return-to-office mandates. In fact, there’s a term for it: coffee badging. It describes employees showing up in the office because they have to, swiping in, spending some time to mark their presence, grabbing a coffee or lunch with colleagues, and leaving. “I plead guilty of being a coffee badger for at least half of my recent office visits,” says Gupta, 43. “Visiting the office is an obligation one must fulfil. Travelling to work is an ordeal. Four hours on the road makes me prefer working from home.”

While there’s no statistics on the trend in the Indian landscape, a US report shows that the coffee-badging trend is becoming a way for workers to get around return-to-office mandates. The 2023 State Of Hybrid Work report by tech company Owl Labs, for instance, shows 69% of the surveyed American employees feeling that they were required to be in the office because of traditional work expectations; and 58% of hybrid employees “coffee badge”.