How ‘coffee badging’ and other trends percolated into global workplace culture

The UK operations of a multinational audit and consultancy firm were reported to have undertaken a round of “silent layoffs” last month, identified as a set of targeted redundancies accompanied by strict guidance about what soon-to-be-former employees could say on social media about their departure from the workplace.

This form of scripted severance had not been widely reported beforehand, although in practice, non-disclosure or specifically worded and carefully choreographed announcements about the departure of personnel have been commonplace for years in the corporate world. The new and implied acknowledgement in the terms of disengagement speaks, perhaps, to the complexities of the “platform lives” of contemporary life, but the desire to control the message is a decades-old impulse.

The lexicon of workplace language grows almost daily, with new terms, like the aforementioned “silent layoffs”, cropping up with increasing frequency, velocity and intensity.

It is also the time of year that some employees are said to be contemplating “quiet vacationing”, according to some workplace experts. This is the apparent practice of undertaking your work from a far-flung location without actually admitting to anyone you’re away. It might also be a maximal end point of pandemic-era data that showed that most office-based employees had the technology to work from anywhere, becoming potential “digital nomads” in the process. By more extreme definitions, “quiet vacationing” is also the act of suggesting an employee is at work while that person is really on unannounced or unplanned leave and not doing anything productive at all.

In the US, a financial services company was reported to have let go of a small group of employees last month for using “mouse jigglers” in an attempt to circumvent workplace surveillance tools by simulating a basic form of device activity and keeping PC screens unlocked.

But is this a case of “remote working” gone very badly awry, or one where employer-employee trust has been so badly broken that one side feels the need to surveil the other, and the second party reacts by attempting to short-circuit crude productivity and engagement measurement tools? Neither conclusion is a particularly comfortable one, but it may most strongly indicate an unbridgeable schism in workplace culture and expectations, or even a lack of understanding around needs and flexibility.

Last summer, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace survey found that the majority of people who were questioned were involved in some form of “quiet quitting”, in other words low- or no-engagement with their jobs, although the usual general caveats about surveys being volatile and anonymised snapshots of mood, feeling and intention should no doubt be applied here in the face of such findings.

The National also identified more than a dozen workplace trends earlier this year, such as “quiet hiring”, “shift shock”, “resenteeism” and “coffee badging” that are said to be evident in office cultures around the world. Add that to all those other phenomena such as the “great resignation” after the first throes of the pandemic, which later mutated into the “great reassessment”, and it might be easy to conclude that fundamental structural and permanent shifts have taken place in workplaces over the past four years.

But is this simply applying theories and labels to what we believe to be trends or is a deeper conflict at play? Is it a great reset or a sequence of smaller changes?

Many offices still operate in hybrid mode, indicating a reset of sorts by mimicking parts of the fully remote working they adopted at the start of 2020. Recent Gallup polling estimates that in the US, about 60 per cent of employees in jobs that could be undertaken remotely want hybrid practices, with approximately 30 per cent expressing a preference for fully remote employment and the remainder wanting to work on-site.

Demand for greater flexibility is the expectation for many workers that has most obviously taken hold. Reports of “mouse jiggling”, however, provide confirmation to on-site working advocates, while every survey that suggests productivity is unaffected by location is grist to the digital nomad’s mill.

But otherwise, the picture is mixed. The focus on identifying trends may indicate a human compulsion to explain and provide a satisfying outcome for amateur anthropologists, rather than a comprehensive reset.

The fact that the glossary of terms from “silent layoffs” to “quiet vacationing” seems to expand with great speed might indicate little more than an agile vocabulary. Language lives and adapts, which probably explains why terms such as taking a “duvet day”, a term popularised in the late 1990s, or “taking a sickie”, whose roots can be traced even further back, have fallen into relative disuse to be replaced by newer, more accurate and, frankly, more acceptable terms.

Analysts and historians may one day also discuss the obvious contradictions between the frequency of use of terms involving the words “quiet” and “silent” and a working world where employees are often more willing to articulate their feelings about workplace experiences than ever before. There is quiet and there is noisy fury, too, which is why those “silent layoffs” ended up making waves beyond the office building where they silently emanated from.