Coffee badging is a neologism referring to the behavioural phenomenon of employees staying briefly at their office, typically long enough to drink a coffee, before departing to work from elsewhere.[1] Coined by Owl Labs in a 2023 workforce management report, workers do this to fulfill in-office attendance requirements following the post-lockdown return to in-person work, with 58% of their hybrid workforce engaging in the practice.[1] As a result, coffee badging is considered alongside quiet quitting, the great resignation, and other trends showcasing employee disengagement as an impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on how employees engage with work.[2][3]
Possible Causes
editStatus Quo Bias
editCoffee badging can be understood as a manifestation of status quo bias in the context of returning to office work after the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which many employees were able to work from home[2]
The status quo bias, which is well documented in the behavioural science literature, posits that because the potential losses of making a decision loom larger than the possible benefits, individuals have a tendency to stay at the status quo.[4][5] In a seminal experiment, Samuelson and Zeckhauser presented participants with investment options for a hypothetical sum of money. When the money had already been allocated to one option, participants were significantly more likely to maintain that allocation than to switch, even when the alternatives were equivalent. [4][6] This bias likely exists because of the benefit it conferred on early humans by discouraging risky behaviour. As Moshe Levy suggests, in a context where losses of food, shelter, or safety were unrecoverable and could lead to death, the cautious approach of remaining at the status quo could have increased odds of survival.[5]
If remote work became the status quo during lockdown, as widespread adoption during the pandemic suggests, then return-to-office mandates would represent a departure from this default. [1][2] In turn, this would provoke the characteristic reluctance to depart from the default associated with status quo bias, motivating circumventive behaviours like coffee badging.
Reactance
editCoffee badging, a behaviour that opposes return-to-office policies, can also be attributed to psychological reactance.[1] The concept refers to “an unpleasant motivational arousal” emerging in reaction to perceived limitations on behavioural freedom.[7][8] Brehm and Weinraub describe children's seemingly increased desire for unreachable toys, where a restriction amplifies the desire to act, as a manifestation of psychological reactance.[9]
Remote working granted employees considerable autonomy over their hours and environment.[10] Return-to-office policies withdrew these freedoms, which could have triggered reactance in affected workers.[7][8][10] This manifests as a drive to restore lost autonomy, with coffee badging serving as a simple means of recovery, satisfying the formal requirements of attendance policies while preserving remote working time.[1][7][8] At an evolutionary level, reactance may exist because, as some evolutionary psychologists argue, autonomy and self-determination were key for allowing individuals to pursue desirable outcomes and avoid undesirable ones.[11] Consequently, early humans who were able to push back against restrictions on their freedom of action through mechanisms like reactance had greater odds of survival and thus genetic propagation.
Psychological Contract Breaching
editThe concept of the psychological contract provides a framework for understanding the tensions that characterise contemporary employee-employer relations.
Argyris proposed that the employment relationship is governed by an implicit psychological contract, under which employees “exchange higher productivity and lower grievances in return for acceptable wages and job security.”[12] Levinson et al. further established that this contract is sustained by the mutual fulfillment of expectations by both parties. [12]
Evidence from Gallup surveys in the United States suggests that the relationship has deteriorated in recent years. The percentage of American employees believing their organizations care about them fell from a lockdown high of 48% in April 2020 to a low of 24% in August 2024, aligning with the symptoms of contract breach empirically identified by psychologists.[3][12] When employees perceive that employers have violated this implicit agreement, such as through the unilateral implementation of return-to-office mandates and attendance requirements, their perceived obligation to reciprocate with compliance diminishes accordingly.[1][12]
This response aligns with the logic of reciprocal altruism, positing that over the course of our evolutionary history, cooperative social living depended on reliably detecting and responding to defection.[12][13][14] Within reciprocal altruism, the “tit-for-tat” strategy has been identified as among the most effective, meaning in the past, using it would have resulted in greater odds of survival.[13][14] Under this framework, coffee badging represents a low-risk modern expression of reciprocal withdrawal for employees proportional to their perception that their implicit contract has been breached.
Limitations
editSeveral limitations apply to the psychological explanations proposed for coffee badging. Most prominently, the phenomenon has been documented primarily through industry surveys due to its recency. Such surveys are subject to response bias, as employees may over- or under-report coffee badging behaviour depending on perceived social desirability. This limits the degree to which causal claims about the psychological mechanisms of coffee badging can be made with confidence.
Additionally, while frameworks such as status quo bias, reactance, and psychological contracts offer plausible explanations for the behavior consistent with the existing literature on the topics, their application remains largely inferential. There is currently a lack of empirical research on coffee badging itself, presenting a clear gap in the literature for future studies to directly address.
Implications
editThe practice of coffee badging has implications for the future of in-person work. The broader trend of employee disengagement of which it is a part may increase the appeal of workplace automation.[2][3] If human workers are to be perceived as unreliable or inefficient, employers may find artificial intelligence comparatively attractive, with coffee badging thus inadvertently contributing to the displacement of the workers engaging in it.
Growing awareness of coffee badging by employers may also encourage re-evaluations of rigid attendance policies in an attempt to restore employee productivity.[1] Doing so could repair the psychological contract between employees and employers by providing mutually beneficial outcomes.[12]
See also
editReferences
edit- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "State of Hybrid Work". Owl Labs. 4 October 2023.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - 1 2 3 4 McPhail, Ruth; Chan, Xi Wen (Carys); May, Robyn; Wilkinson, Adrian (2 January 2024). "Post-COVID remote working and its impact on people, productivity, and the planet: an exploratory scoping review". The International Journal of Human Resource Management. 35 (1): 154–182. doi:10.1080/09585192.2023.2221385. ISSN 0958-5192.
- 1 2 3 Harter, Jim; Wigert, Ben (11 March 2025). "The Post-Pandemic Workplace: The Experiment Continues". Gallup.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - 1 2 Kahneman, Daniel; Knetsch, Jack; Thaler, Richard (1991). "Anomalies: The endowment effect, loss aversion, and status quo bias". The Journal of Economic Perspectives. 5 (1): 193–206 – via JSTOR.
- 1 2 Levy, Moshe (2015). "An evolutionary explanation for risk aversion". Journal of Economic Psychology. 46: 51–61. doi:10.1016/j.joep.2014.12.001 – via Elsevier Science Direct.
- ↑ Samuelson, William; Zeckhauser, Richard (1988). "Status Quo Bias in Decision Making". Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. 1 (1): 7–59 – via JSTOR.
- 1 2 3 Steindl, Christina; Jonas, Eva; Sittenthaler, Sandra; Traut-Mattausch, Eva; Greenberg, Jeff (2015). "Understanding Psychological Reactance: New Developments and Findings". Zeitschrift für Psychologie. 223 (4): 205–214. doi:10.1027/2151-2604/a000222. ISSN 2190-8370. PMC 4675534. PMID 27453805 – via Hogrefe eContent.
- 1 2 3 Brehm, Jack (1966). A Theory of Psychological Reactance. Academic Press.
- ↑ Brehm, Sharon; Weinraub, Marsha (1977). "Physical barriers and psychological reactance: 2-yr-olds' responses to threats to freedom". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 35 (11): 830–836. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.35.11.830. ISSN 1939-1315 – via APA PsycNet.
- 1 2 Fan, Wen; Moen, Phyllis (2023). "Ongoing Remote Work, Returning to Working at Work, or in between during COVID-19: What Promotes Subjective Well-Being?". Journal of Health and Social Behavior. 64 (1): 152–171. doi:10.1177/00221465221150283. ISSN 0022-1465. PMC 9902780. PMID 36694978 – via SageJournals.
- ↑ Leotti, Lauren A.; Iyengar, Sheena S.; Ochsner, Kevin N. (2010). "Born to choose: the origins and value of the need for control". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 14 (10): 457–463. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2010.08.001. PMC 2944661. PMID 20817592 – via Elsevier Science Direct.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Coyle-Shapiro, Jacqueline; Parzefall, Marjo-Riitta (2008), "Psychological Contracts", The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Behavior: Volume I - Micro Approaches, SAGE Publications, pp. 17–34, doi:10.4135/9781849200448.n2
- 1 2 Trivers, Robert L. (1971). "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism". The Quarterly Review of Biology. 46 (1): 35–57. doi:10.1086/406755. ISSN 0033-5770.
- 1 2 Axelrod, Robert; Hamilton, William D. (27 March 1981). "The Evolution of Cooperation". Science. 211 (4489): 1390–1396. doi:10.1126/science.7466396. ISSN 0036-8075.
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