Return-to-office rebellion sparks wild office behavior as Wall Street and Amazon demand workers show up
Short of simply refusing to turn up office workers are finding new creative solutions to limit their in-person hours.
The most popular trend du jour, driven largely by millennials, is 'coffee badging'. It involves showing up at the office just long enough to grab a coffee, greet the right people, and then quietly leave to finish the day working remotely.
The behavior is now so widespread that executives are seeing it as a threat to their efforts to return workforces to the office.
Three-quarters of companies say they are struggling with employees coffee badging, a recent report found.
At Samsung, the practice got so out of hand that its US semiconductor division has rolled out a return-to-office monitoring tool, Business Insider reported earlier this week.
The 'compliance tool' makes sure staff are turning up as often as expected by their bosses and also prevents 'lunch/coffee badging,' the company wrote in a memo to employees.
Amazon has also cracked down, having one-on-one conversations with repeat offenders, Fortune reported.
Now that it's been more than a year, we're starting to speak directly with employees who haven't regularly been spending meaningful amounts of time in the office to ensure they understand the importance of spending quality time with their colleagues,' a spokesperson from Amazon told the publication.
Elsewhere 44 percent of hybrid workers admitted to coffee badging, according to a survey conducted by Owl Labs.
According to Bezinga millennials are the demographic most likely to be trying to stretch the limits of hybrid work policies.
Gen Z meanwhile are actually more keen to return to the office after starting their careers remotely during the pandemic.
Young workers attend the office 3.1 days a week, compared to older age groups who show up between 2.5 and 2.7 days a week, a survey by property group JLL found.
Prominent voices such as JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon have warned that homeworking is holding younger workers back.
'The young generation is being damaged by this,' he said in a leaked recording of a private meeting. 'They're being left behind socially, in sharing ideas, and meeting people.'
Company wide mandates for minimum office attendance are becoming more common.
Google is forcing some remote workers to return to the office for at least three days a week
Recently Google announced that many workers who had previously been cleared for home working would now have to attend the office for a minimum of three days a week.
If staff do not comply they will face losing their jobs, the company said in April.
TD Bank also demanded its workers return to their corporate offices at least four days a week by early November.
Melanie Burns, the bank's head of HR, told employees that working in person will boost collaboration and decision making.
Burns also said coming into the office could improve individuals career prospects.
For the first time since the pandemic, more than half of Fortune 100 employees are now expecting employees to show up five days a week.
As well as private companies the federal government is also .
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The Sun
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He knows exactly what to say to please Trump, from confirming that the war would not have started if Trump had been president in 2022, to agreeing with Trump that Russian electoral interference in the 2016 US election was a 'hoax'. Appealing to Trump's greed, Putin spoke of the 'tremendous potential' for business cooperation. And to the outrage of many Ukrainians, Putin called the war that he himself started a 'terrible tragedy for us' and a 'wound' and insisted that Russians considered Ukrainians a 'brotherly nation'. That is a clear echo of a common Russian narrative that the war was fomented by western interference in Kyiv's affairs. It was also clear that the Kremlin's position has barely changed since 2022. When Putin speaks of the 'root causes' of the conflict he is saying that he sees an independent Ukraine that has the ability to defend itself is a fundamental threat to Russia. When he calls for a 'fair balance of security' Putin means restrictions on Nato deployments in the Baltics, Poland and Romania. Small wonder that ultranationalist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin called the summit 'excellent… the best result that we could expect!' Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orbán wrote that 'the world is a safer place today than it was yesterday' as a result of the summit. The big question now is whether Trump will follow up by putting more pressure on Russia – or more pressure on Ukraine to capitulate. Trump will meet with Zelensky on Monday in the Oval Office to discuss what Trump called 'points that we negotiated [with Putin] and points that we largely have agreed upon. I think we have agreed on a lot… Ukraine has to agree to it, maybe they'll say no.' For Zelensky, the choice will be to agree to the terms Trump negotiated over his head – or refuse, and try to fight on with European help. Unfortunately for Ukraine, Putin doesn't seem to care whether the endgame of the war plays out on the negotiating table or the battlefield. Putin believes that he can win either way.
