This CEO encourages ‘coffee badging’: ‘I don’t hire people to watch them work’

Coffee badging involves employees swiping their badge into the workplace, hanging around long enough to drink a coffee and chat with colleagues before heading back home to get the work done. (Representative image credit: Unsplash)

As companies continue to nudge employees to return to office, HR experts in India have been highlighting a “concerning” workplace trend where employees are engaging in a superficial "return to office" strategy by "coffee badging". While many workplaces have been calling out the practice as an empty gesture, the CEO of Boston-based video conferencing equipment maker Owl Labs, isn’t one of them.

Frank Weishaupt -- who has more than 20 years of executive experience at small startups and large companies such as Yahoo -- actively encourages his employees to create schedules that work for them, in locations that make sense, including “coffee badging.”

The term refers to the practice of employees swiping their badge into the workplace, hanging around long enough to drink a coffee and chat with colleagues before heading back home to get the work done.

The strategy should be acceptable to bosses everywhere, Weishaupt told CNBC Make It. If someone will benefit from the office’s social interactions before needing isolation to be productive, let them do exactly that, he added.

“We hire people to do a job. I don’t hire people to watch them work,” Weishaupt told the publication. “I do love the in-office participation when we get it, but I want it to be organic.”

“The office has a role, but mandating that you must come into the office on this day, at this time, and leave no earlier than this time -- that is a dead concept. Monitoring employee activity is a really slippery slope where you’re going to lose trust," the Owl Labs CEO added.

According to a survey of 3,000 American workers and managers from software firm Checkr, most bosses also want to work from home. And so, Weishaupt has a suggestion for any boss feeling caught in the middle: "Trust your gut and do what’s right for your particular workplace".

“The office has a role, but it’s more task based,” he told CNBC Make It. “If I have meetings on Wednesday morning that need to be in person, in the office, I will be. And if I choose to be in the office the remainder of the day to finish my work, I’ll do it. But if I want to do it in another location, I should be able to have that flexibility.”

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