When I sent out a request — ”Who admits to coffee badging?” — confessions flooded my inbox. Here’s a sample:
“I shuffle in at 7:52 a.m., swipe my badge and make a straight shot to the coffeepot. A quick pour and I’m gone, slipping out through the side exit. It’s midafternoon before anyone realizes I’m not in my cubicle. By then, I’ve hit “reply all” to an email chain, securing his digital presence to upper management.”
“When the Atilla the Hun ‘you’ve got to be on-site five days a week’ memo came out, I figured ‘Yeah, I’d pretend.’ My employer owns my work, but not my life. I badge in and leave once my manager has made his daily pass by my workstation.”
“I show up at 8:55, just shy of the unwritten ‘you’re late’ threshold. I breeze past the reception desk and punch my badge against the scanner. I make myself an espresso while I check emails. By 9:35, I’m out the door, headed home to ‘focus’ with dogs curled at my feet.”
“My morning routine includes one calculated office stop, timed for 11:15 a.m. when most team leads wander out for early lunches.” She tapped her badge, poured black coffee into her branded tumbler, and left it steaming in plain sight on her desk. “A brief exchange with my manager in her office cements my appearance. I’m settled back in my home office in time to join the afternoon Slack thread.”
Coffee badging is employees clocking in for a brief period to grab a coffee, show their face and get credit for being onsite — before departing to work (or not) elsewhere.
According to a survey of 2,000 employees in 2024, 44% of hybrid employees admit to coffee badging. A full 70% report their employers have caught them.
Coffee badgers offer many reasons: They’ve grown accustomed to working from home; they don’t benefit from being in the office; they work more productively offsite; they can better manage their children or balance their lives if they work from home.
The problem: This deceptive “gaming the system” signals larger problems for employers with trust and employee disengagement. According to a recent Harris Poll, 28% of U.S. employees take time off without officially being out of the office, and 31% “move their mouse” to maintain online status on their company’s messaging systems.
Employers, meanwhile, are fighting back — using technology to verify onsite attendance and duration of attendance; individually monitoring badge swipes and disciplining coffee badgers. Dell has instituted a color-coded rating systems to grade employees’ office attendance, with red flags indicating limited onsite presence. Wells Fargo fired a dozen employees who simulated keyboard activity to falsely pretend they were working when they weren’t.
The better answer? Unless employees buy into their jobs, they’ll game any system employers design to measure accountability. As I wrote in “Managing for Accountability,” accountability is a choice an employer wants every employee to make. Employees with accountability don’t play coffee badge games; they invest themselves in their jobs, doing what they say they will. Accountable employees fuel an organization’s success.
Accountability doesn’t happen by chance. Employers need to learn how to select job candidates who will be accountable, and then to reward those employees so they remain on board. Further, accountability starts at the top. Leaders shape the culture and need to walk their talk, modeling the ethics and behaviors they want to see in their organization. If leaders want employees to work with honesty, commitment and ingenuity, the leaders need to show integrity, work ethic and openness to new ideas — and that includes realizing that employees have shifted in what they expect from employers.
According to a recent survey of 27,000 workers across the globe, while 56% consider themselves ambitious, 47% don’t focus on career progression. Instead, a new sense of “ambition” has emerged that emphasizes work-life balance, flexibility and upskilling.
If you want your employees to invest in your organization, you need to engage with them and understand their concerns. Employees want to impact their work environments — and they’ll do that with or without their managers’ consent.