44% of hybrid workers admit to coffee badging: showing up just long enough to be seen.

Someone comes into the office for the first time this week. They make a coffee, stand by the machine for a few minutes, talk to two people they haven't seen since Tuesday, and leave an hour later to do the actual work somewhere else. Nobody asks where they're going. The coffee already answered the question.

This has a name now. People call it coffee badging.

What the Data Actually Says

Owl Labs' State of Hybrid Work 2025 UK report surveyed 2,000 full-time UK workers in July 2025. It found that 44% of hybrid employees admit they sometimes go into the office for a few hours just to be seen, and a further 10% haven't done it yet but say they'd like to try. Among those who do it, 56% say they've been caught but their employer didn't mind, 33% say they haven't been caught, and 11% say they were caught and their employer was unhappy about it.

That's a large minority, not a majority, and it's self-reported: people describing their own habits, not something independently observed. The same report puts the wider attendance picture around it: 40% of hybrid workers say they go in three days a week, 27% say four, and when asked what they'd actually prefer, the answers split, with 34% wanting two days and 30% wanting three.

What It Doesn't Tell Us

It doesn't tell us whether this is common everywhere, only that it's common enough in this one UK sample to have its own name. It doesn't tell us anything about coffee itself, what it does, or whether the people doing this are drinking more or less of it than anyone else. And it isn't a verdict on hybrid work, on the people doing this, or on the employers who've noticed and shrugged. It's one figure, from one survey, describing one behaviour.

The Coffee Isn't Doing What Coffee Usually Does

Look at what the coffee is actually for in this specific moment, and it's not really about the coffee. It's a prop. Standing at the machine is a socially legible reason to be in a specific place, at a specific time, doing something other than working. The coffee gets someone through the door and gives the visit a shape. What it doesn't do is answer to the working day itself, because for that hour, the working day is happening somewhere else.

That's a smaller version of a pattern we keep running into. A drink chosen for what a moment needs to look like, rather than what the moment actually calls for, isn't really a choice at all. It's a placeholder.

Why 0800Labs Is Interested

We're not interested in whether coffee badging is honest or dishonest, or in adjudicating anyone's hybrid-work arrangement. We're interested in the pattern underneath it: a drink standing in for a decision nobody actually made.

We call the alternative Workday Hydration. It's our own term, not an established category, and not a claim about what this survey found or about what any drink does. It names the idea that a working moment deserves a drink chosen for that moment, not one borrowed to make a different moment look right.

We're building something for that. If that's useful, the waitlist is below.