coffee badging

Coffee badging is showing up at the office just long enough to be seen, swipe your badge, grab a coffee and chat, then heading home to do the actual work remotely.

What coffee badging means

Merriam-Webster defines coffee badging as working on-site for a short, perfunctory amount of time and then going back to working from home. It’s also a verb (“I coffee badged on Tuesday”), and someone who does it is a coffee badger. The point is to meet a return-to-office rule on paper while keeping most of the remote-work routine.

Employers aren’t fans. Merriam-Webster quotes a 2024 Business Insider headline about Amazon cracking down on coffee badging by tracking individual hours in the office.

Examples

• “The policy says three office days, so half the team coffee badges and leaves by 11.”
• “I’m coffee badging today, I have a delivery coming at two.”
• “Our manager started checking how long people stay, so the coffee badgers got caught.”

Where it came from

It grew out of companies calling employees back to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic. Merriam-Webster links the earliest uses to research by Owl Labs, a video-conferencing company. A Forbes article used it in March 2023, and an Owl Labs survey that September reported that 58% of hybrid workers said they were coffee badging. The “badge” is partly literal (swiping an ID badge) and partly a joke about earning an imaginary badge for showing up.

Related terms

• Quiet quitting: doing only what’s required.
• Bare minimum Monday: easing into the week.
• Overemployment: secretly holding two full-time jobs.
• Acting your wage: working only as hard as you’re paid to.

See more terms like this in our work and money slang guide.