to be "coffee badging" when I'm working from home

[pearlbeach]

Just read something on social about the 'new' trend of coffee badging - where you go into the office, grab a coffee, get seen by your boss and then leave to work from home - but ...loads of people log on to their work computer when they're WFH, fire off an email, go to one teams meeting, then leave and put the washing on, etc...during work hours. It's basically coffee badging from home??? Personally, my number one job that I get done when I WFH is the washing (would be higher than bunkbeds if I went into the office). I do get my paid work done. But AIBU to do life/home stuff as well, am I coffee badging from home?

Lol

My DH has worked mainly from home for many years,long before it was a common thing. He's always done other bits and pieces during the day, including the school runs when our DC were little. Right now he's in the garden feeding our chickens.
His bosses know this and always have done. In fact the degree of flexibility was one of the main reasons he took the job. But his job lends itself to that kind of working. There are some times he absolutely has to be working, mainly meetings, but a lot of what he does can equally well be done at 10am or 10pm and as long as his work is up to date nobody really cares when he actually does it. In fact quite a bit of his work has to be done at antisocial hours because it is dealing with international clients and he also travels abroad quite a lot. So it cuts both ways. He'll get up to do a Teams call to Japan at 3am but didn’t expect his boss to kick off in the days when he'd be out doing school pick up for half an hour at 3pm. And this week he will be away from tomorrow morning until Saturday lunchtime with lots of meetings etc outside standard working hours. He accepts that, and the company accept that he is going to feed the chickens and put the Tesco delivery away at some point today.
But if you have a job with fixed hours and you start and finish at set times regardless of where you're up to with your work then I think you should probably stick to those if you are working from home just as if you were physically at work. Though of course you should still be entitled to the breaks you'd get in the office so it's nobody's business if you use that time to put a load of washing in.

Surely shoving load of washing in is no different from having a toilet break or making a brew

@cherryflan please tell me that was intentional 😂

This is very common at my place, and usually involves the school run so we can't have meetings between 12 and 4 with various people's childcare arrangements.

Just go to the office on office days, stay there and have lunch at a normal time.

My guess would a reference to an attendance badge at a seminar for example?

So walk in, get a badge?

Sighs deeply, I work completely flexibly so there's work to be done and a timeframe to do it but it matters not a jot whether I do that at night, early morning or the middle of the afternoon. Do I put the washing on, yes, do I read a bit of my book yes, do I miss a deadline, no.

Depends on your job.

I am grown up, no-one is checking what I am doing by the minute, yes I can deal with laundry, all the 10mn it takes. I am at my desk at midnight or on Sunday if I need to, it's give an take. I don't clock a strict 9 to 6, you can't have it both ways.

Jobs with a queue of customers waiting for you to answer their call for example? Not so much.

It makes no difference if you are in the office or at home. Can I pop down the shops to run some errands during office hours when I am in the office? Or even meet a friend for coffee? Absolutely. So what's the difference.

so social media told u this was an ok thing to do and you whole heartedly must do it because social media said so

🥱
Pretty sure that many people who are required to physically visit the office (due to policy ) but don’t need to be in the office to complete their work ( or benefit the team) will do this to some degree. Just wastes everyone’s time and money.
Good supervisors and managers will know who are pulling their weight whether the team are office or home based.

The firm I work for monitor office attendance based on security pass swiping. But you only need swipe to get in, to get out you push buttons, so they would have no idea how long anyone is staying in the office for.

They are only monitoring it to justify paying rent, not to increase productivity. From the non work noise in the office, I'd say productivity has taken a dive. On my office day I book a meeting room for my planned calls as it's too noisy otherwise. So it's just me sat in a room on a call, exactly as I would be at home but with only one screen not three.

I can easily get the dishwasher filled, run and emptied, do a laundry and hang it up to dry during the day (most days). It only takes a few minutes and I just do little bits through the day, as I walk through the kitchen to get drinks or use the loo.

Isn't it just another term the youngsters have given for something we've been doing for years.

Well I work less than 2 feet away from my boss so I think I'd be rumbled pretty quick.

I do get a lot done around the house on my wfh days though

'Coffee badging' and 'working from home and not really doing any work' aren't the same thing though, surely? One is doing your work from a different location to the office, and the other is not doing your work at all, or at least not much of it.

Either way, though, I think it really depends on your employer what is/isn't OK. My own employer is pretty flexible and provided we put the hours in and get the job done (and are available for meetings etc of course) we don't have to be glued to our laptops all the time at home. Lots of people start/finish at different times or do a split day where they'll work up to the school run, then take a couple of hours off, then do more in the evening.

I just noticed it myself, is it rude to laugh at your own typos!

(I saw this described a Muprhy's Law on another thread )

Sorry, but off track but is the WFH debate not resting on productivity levels..surely if firms are still getting their money's worth out of their staff it's a moot point.

Bit

Are you saying you do as little possible for as much as possible? And that’s a good thing for the country? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

"Coffee badging"? Do you mean skiving?

Can’t see how this works in practice - most company buildings require you to tap a card on the way in and way out so that they have an accurate role call in the event of a fire or some other emergency. If you coffee badge and skive off home without alerting someone you are potentially putting other people at risk if there WAS an emergency as fire crew etc could be in the building looking for people who have left. Bloody irresponsible.

I assumed it was something to do with badgers. I would go into the office more frequently if they got a badger. Who wouldn't love that?

I'll be honest regardless of MN looking down on it. I WFH occasionally but will soon be moving to a permanent hybrid model, so will be at home half the time. I have and will be doing other things that need done when at home - I've previously had a clear out of an entire room on a WFH home day. Although I am salaried, my work has peaks and troughs. On clear out day, even my manager had said to keep laptop on to keep an eye out for any emails, but that was all. No point in sitting staring at a screen all day for no reason.

Quite.
My DH is far more productive when he works from home than on the days when he actually goes into his base office. Aside from the fact that he's not wasting time on a long commute, there are far less distractions at home even allowing for the occasional domestic task. There's nobody to interrupt him with idle chat about last night's TV or asking for advice about their work, lunch is 5 mins in the kitchen and back to his desk to eat his sandwich as opposed to an actual break in the canteen and nobody switches the light off and wants to vacuum under his desk at 6pm. Not that that is necessarily good for him of course and there are definite benefits to interactions with colleagues, both professional and social, but just in terms of throughput, if employees are diligent I suspect many employers do pretty well out of those who WFH. Certainly if my DH has a deadline looming he stays at home as he values the peace and quiet.
Obviously doesn't work for everyone - my job had very little that could be done at home - and some employees will take the piss if they are not being physically supervised, but I think for lots of people, as long as they are getting their work done in the required timescales that's all that matters. One of my nephews spent much of last Summer working remotely at his grandparents house in a different country. I would put money on him having gone swimming or surfing more or less every day but he got his work done and hit his deadlines and that's all his employers cared about.

What about those who like me don't drink coffee?