Millennials lead the ‘coffee badging’ revolt to protest return to office as businesses push to fill empty seats

This new buzzword is stirring anxiety in boardrooms, as “coffee badging” shows that what started as a cheeky workaround to return-to-office mandates post-COVID has become a significant challenge for companies grappling with the changing rules of workplace engagement

The scope of the blem Recent surveys show that coffee badging is not a fringe behavior: It is now practiced by a staggering portion of the workforce

But the issue isn’t confined to a small segment of multinationals or workers

Insider recently dered a scoop that coffee badging has gotten so bad at Samsung’s U.S. semiconductor division that it explicitly scolded workers it and rolled out an RTO monitoring tool

While celebrating that “more smiling faces can be seen in the hallways,” Samsung announced its new “compliance tool for People Managers” will “ensure that team members are fulfilling their expectation regarding in office work — however that is defined with their leader — as well as guarding against instances of lunch/coffee badging.” Samsung’s move ed a coffee-badging crackdown at Amazon

It has gotten so bad there that managers are having 1:1 conversations with employees how many hours they are literally returning to the office. “Now that it’s been more than a year, we’re starting to speak directly with employees who haven’t regularly been spending meaningful amounts of time in the office to ensure they understand the importance of spending quality time with their colleagues,” Amazon previously said in a statement to Fortune

Why are so many companies struggling? Return-to-office (RTO) mandates were supposed to restore normalcy and boost ductivity

Instead, they’ve triggered a silent revolt

Employees—especially millennials—are leveraging hybrid policies in their favor, finding the least disruptive way to comply, while minimizing commute and office time

How companies respond Faced with a widespread and hard-to-measure trend, companies are experimenting with everything from stricter tracking to radically new incentives

First is, simply, tracking badge swipes: Gartner reported that 60% of companies were tracking employees as of 2022, more than doubling since the beginning of the pandemic and only greater in magnitude since

Others, Amazon, now require a minimum number of work hours in-office, not just a badge swipe

A minority are shifting from hours-based to results-based evaluations, hoping to boost authentic office engagement

Others court employees with imved amenities and greater schedule autonomy, aiming to make office time more appealing than mandatory

Still, leaders worry that coffee badging signals deeper disengagement—and that one-size-fits-all RTO strategies are backfiring

As long as employees can be ductive remotely—and view in-person time as a performative hoop—companies will need to rethink the value position of the office, not just the enforcement

With the majority of companies reporting struggles and nearly half of hybrid workers engaging in the practice, coffee badging isn’t going away soon

Rather than fighting it with stricter rules, organizations may need to listen to what it reveals employee motivation, engagement, and the future of work culture itself

Are you a coffee badger? Do you have them on your team, or know of others who swipe in and out after a brief appearance? We’d love to hear from you

Get in touch at nick.lichtenberg@consultant.fortune.com

For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft

An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing

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