James King

This is a picture of a giant spider with a sign saying “Emergency Assembly Point”. I find it funny because of the innovation shown on the part of the (imaginary) spider. Creating an emergency and then having people rush into your web shows extraordinary entrepreneurial thinking.

It is also funny because it just looks odd. As a work of art, I find this clever and intriguing. I would love to learn more about how this idea came to be realised at all.

It is a work of art, but sometimes I see things just as odd and intriguing in the real world. Things that clearly seem wrong to me, while others, such as the people working near this spider, seem to behave as though everything is find and normal.

As an example, I just read an article about how an Australian Bank is asking staff to come back to the office 4 days a week.

I have my own views on hybrid working, that I am happy to share, but what caught my interest was a new term I had never heard of – “Coffee Badging”.

Coffee Badging is where employees come to the office to show their face. They may also sit down and have a coffee with some people. Then, having been seen in the office by people, they head back home again.

I guess the advantage for the badger is that they can say they were in the office and the advantage for the managers is that they see them and think “phew – these people are in the office.” Doesn’t that seem a bit odd to you though? If you want to explain the term “aberrant behaviour” to someone, this sounds like a great example to refer to.

In addition to being odd, you might see it as an issue that people come all the way into the office to have a coffee and then go home again. You are not alone in seeing this as an issue. Actually, there seem to be two groups who agree there is an issue, but frame that issue in quite different ways to each other.

According to the article on the bank, managers there are concerned because employees are not really spending time in the office – they are just pretending to do so. It would be like the bank just pretending to comply with anti-money laundering legislation, or only pretending to care about the impact of new fees on customers. According to the article, people who do stay in the office all day will also be annoyed that others just come in for an hour or so before commuting back home again.

But there is also another view, one that puts the blame on the managers.

A couple of articles I found framed coffee badging as a logical response to excessive workplace monitoring. So the coffee badgers are actually rebels who are, through their actions, fighting against injustice by rendering the authoritarian micromanagers powerless. So it is about reclaiming control from bosses who are seen as disrespecting and micromanaging the employees.

Something seems off here, in fact just as off as the idea of rushing to sit under a giant spider when the spider is the cause of an emergency.

Surely the goal of the manager is not to manage the location of the people who are evading work. Surely if they spend 8 hours drinking coffee and avoiding work, others will be annoyed and productivity will be wiped out.

And surely the goal of most employees is not to be in a job you hate so much that you need to actively sabotage things and risk the wrath of angry managers when their skullduggery in discovered..

More likely, what we are seeing is a lack of trust – maybe the managers who worry about coffee badging are actually not trusting the employees and therefore assuming that people will “coffee badge” rather than comply with directives that are, in themselves, designed to mitigate a lack of trust without confronting that issue.

Or maybe the managers only know how to delegate tasks when they can observe people performing them. If so, then the issue is not the location of the people, but the competence of the managers who have not learned effective delegation.

If either of these is the case, letting people work from home will fail, but not because they work from home.

Having people out of sight of the managers might exacerbate the problem, but it is not actually the problem. Even in the office the people will face a lack of trust and ineffective delegation without empowerment – they will be unproductive and unengaged.

That sounds like a big leadership fail to me and regardless of whether people are in the office, at home or meeting over coffee, the lack of trust and ability to delegate are things we should worry about.

That seems like a big leadership fail. So maybe the employees are right to “stick it to the system”. But that does not seem right either.

I think if people are happy to give the appearance of working, while actually taking the micky, that is a big issue and it is not about rebellion, it is about a lack of alignment and accountability. And regardless of whether people who lack accountability work from home, drink coffee at work, sit in meetings or sit at their desk, they will have a very negative impact on those around them.

If I was their team mates, I would not be annoyed that they travelled all the way to work in order to just go home again. I would be annoyed that they had an attitude that they could pretend to work while I had to carry extra responsibility.

I would be annoyed that I had to redo work, miss deadlines or chase others up because they were checked out or uncaring.

So maybe Coffee Badging is a thing and maybe (definitely) it is a funny thing if it is real. But it is not the thing we should be looking at.

We should be looking at our teams and our friends at work to make sure they are engaged and able to work effectively. And we should be looking at our leaders for leadership, rather than worry and whining about employees.