On would call it the “ coffee badging ». This would be the gesture of resistance of employees required to return to work face-to-face: badge in to come back for a coffee at the office, time to chat and above all to be seen, and return to a place where we can really work. That is to say at home. Fifty-eight percent of employees who alternate between teleworking and face-to-face work would be inclined to do so, according to the company Owl Labs, which publishes its seventh edition of its “State of Hybrid Work” and discusses this trend, a new concept always being promoted by a research company we’ve never heard of.
THE “coffee badging” has been added for several weeks to a whole lexicon of new behaviors at work: the “quiet exit” (go to the office doing as little as possible), “snail girl”, which in opposition to the “boss girl”, rejects the idea of struggling to make a career. As to “office peackocking” (“peacocking office”), it refers to the efforts of companies to have attractive premises to attract employees back with enthusiasm…
Let’s be frank: most of these concepts appear more on the TikTok network than among work sociologists. And as is often the case, these expressions which claim to apply to the entire world of work are generally reserved for the tertiary sector. House painters, neurosurgeons and oil rig technicians hardly do any work. “coffee badging”.
Let’s be even more frank: behind this concept fair lies a reality, that of a balance of power between employer and employees which is always the same. It’s not with “office peackocking” that companies have brought their employees back to the office; their return is more often initiated by a new regulation or a whistle given during an interview.
A signal to employees
In a recent interview filmed for the website of Wall Street Journal, Palmer Luckey, of defense systems company Anduril Industries, said he didn’t understand the talk about being more focused and efficient at home when writing lines of code. “Your job is not to write lines of code but to work with others to better solve problems,” he summarized.
In his biography of the American businessman Elon Musk, recently published in French by Fayard, journalist Walter Isaacson mentions four times the propensity of the founder of Tesla and SpaceX to sleep under his desk. Elon Musk would have ordered a sofa to rest in the premises of X (formerly Twitter), not so much to do so as to send a signal to the employees.
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