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. 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. 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.

Coffee 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

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. 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. 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.

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. In turn, this would provoke the characteristic reluctance to depart from the default associated with status quo bias, motivating circumventive behaviours like coffee badging.

Coffee badging, a behaviour that opposes return-to-office policies, can also be attributed to psychological reactance. The concept refers to “an unpleasant motivational arousal” emerging in reaction to perceived limitations on behavioural freedom. 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.

Remote working granted employees considerable autonomy over their hours and environment. Return-to-office policies withdrew these freedoms, which could have triggered reactance in affected workers. 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. 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. 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.

The 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.” Levinson et al. further established that this contract is sustained by the mutual fulfillment of expectations by both parties.