If You’re Forced to Return to the Office, Try the Coffee Badge.
If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that working from home is not only possible, but with the right support, it can be more effective . While there is plenty of evidence that working from home has a number of benefits for employees, including increased productivity and reduced stress, many employers disagree .
Since employers have all the power, including the right to fire, many of us have been forced back into the office, where we must sit in a cubicle and do work that could just as easily be done at home. . If you haven’t already realized that it’s less about the actual work you do and more about how your boss perceives you to work, there’s a lesson to be learned.
What is a coffee badge?
One survival strategy for getting back to the office (while maintaining your sanity) is a strategy known as the “coffee badge”: showing up to the office for part of the day with the intention of seeing your boss and only being seen to finish work. work at home. This often involves arriving a little later to avoid morning traffic, meeting colleagues for coffee or lunch and discussing work-related issues one-on-one, and then heading home early.
According to Owl Labs, 58 percent of hybrid workers report “coffee badges .” As far as coping strategies go, this is a good strategy because it helps lighten the load a little by reducing the stress of rush hour commuting while also preserving some of the best parts of going to the office, like talking. it’s face to face with colleagues. If going to the office is a game of optics, you might as well be strategic about it, and coffee badges can help with that.
Make sure the risk is worth it
As with many other aspects of working life, using coffee badges comes with its own policies and risks, which can vary depending on who is doing it. For the coffee icon to be a successful return-to-office strategy, you need to work for a company that allows more flexibility in terms of when you need to be in the office and when you can finish work at home. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported , some companies track the exact number of hours workers spend in the office; If you work in such a culture, a coffee icon will not be a viable option.
Even if the policy is flexible, there are also some additional risks associated with coffee labeling. As a series of studies of remote workers found , women who left during the workday were more likely to be noticed and their absences considered to be due to personal reasons, while men were less likely to be noticed and their absences to be believed to be due to work commitments. It’s wrong, it’s certainly not fair, but it’s the reality of work as we know it now.
It’s probably safe to assume that the coffee badge may come with a similar risk of discrimination: women are judged more harshly for being late and leaving early than men. With that said, sometimes you just have to do what you need to do to stay sane, whether that’s showing up at the office or advocating for a fully remote position, recognizing that sometimes work culture does help. suck.