Every morning, Mr. A strolls into the office at 9 a.m., swiping his badge with perfect enthusiasm.

He hits a few meetings, grabs coffee with colleagues, and keeps the daily buzz going.

But here's the twist.

Come noon, he sneaks out, heading home to wrap up his work in comfort.

By around 5, he's clocked out.

Mission accomplished.

Mr. A has redefined the 9-to-5 in his own terms, and interestingly, this trend also has a name.

A new trend emerging in the back-to-office push, and that is coffee badging.

Coffee badging is two worlds colliding.

It's employers wanting to get their workers back into the office, and employees desire to really have more flexibility on the job.

And so that's coming together in this trend of coffee badging.

Coffee badging is happening because workers are using this as a soft revolt against their return-to-office mandates that companies have put out.

And they just, like, badge in, have a coffee, check in with their colleagues, do some work, and then leave their office early.

It is a silent protest of saying, I just want to be home.

Coffee badging was a term that Owl Labs coined as part of its 2023 State of Hybrid Work Report.

And what we found was, is that employees weren't necessarily returning to the office in a traditional eight-to-five manner, five days a week, but they were coffee badging.

Some were going in just to show face, grab a cup of coffee, say hi to some of their colleagues, maybe their boss, so that they could check the box for their company's return-to-office mandate.

Whereas others were going into the office for different periods of time, maybe for reasons that the office offered them luxuries that the home environment didn't, which is access to technology, which was meeting with colleagues, or being in in-person meetings.

A lot of the workplace trends that we're seeing right now are very much reflective of what's happening in the overall job market.

The overall U.S. economy is performing well, but the job market is cooling.

A closer look at the monthly job creation over the past two years reveals the broader trend, with the labor market adding just 227,000 jobs in November.

Some experts note that workplace trends often mirror the job market.

During the pandemic, when workers' demand was high, quiet quitting became the dominant workplace theme.

But now, as the job market is tighter, particularly for white-collar jobs, coffee badging is trending.

Workplace trends reflect what's happening in the job market largely because you can tell who has the power.

During COVID, the employees had the power.

Employers were scared to death of losing employees, and it was a tight job market, and it was very difficult to get qualified employees in the door.

These days, the employer has the power because even though the job market fundamentally is still good, it's not nearly as strong as it used to be.

So employees can't job hop the way that they did two or three years ago.

Now, from the perspective of the employer, it's, look, we gave you your time.

Now it's our time.

You're going to come back to the office, and if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere.

Dynamics that we saw in the labor force a couple of years ago were very unusual.

The issue is that we had much fewer workers, and a lot of power had really shifted towards employees and away from employers in the workforce relationship.

That's one of the reasons we saw quiet quitting, because there was just a lot of demand for workers and people weren't that worried about losing their jobs in that kind of an environment, whereas now we have an environment that's much more balanced.

Productivity has long been a contentious issue for supporters and critics of remote work, with mixed results and studies measuring its impact.

For instance, October 2024 research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that productivity increased with the rise of remote work across 61 private sector industries from 2019 to 2021.

However, a major July 2023 study by Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research reported that fully remote work is linked to about 10% lower productivity than fully in-person work.

So studies are not clear on whether remote work makes you more or less productive.

There's mixed evidence there.

But there are perceptions that coming together can increase productivity.

The reason there's no clear answer on this one is because it's incredibly hard to measure how remote work is impacting productivity.

So it really depends on the job, it depends on the skill and the task that you're trying to complete, what industry you're in, what kind of worker you are.

That makes it incredibly hard to get an exact answer to is remote work good or bad for productivity.

When I look at the relationship between at homework versus in the office work as it relates to productivity, I have a different perspective than a lot of people because I'm not going to debate the empirical numbers.

I'm going to simply say one thing.

Productivity is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder.

Who has the power?

In the case of the company, if the company is paying your salary, the company is giving you a paycheck, and the company says in order to justify your productivity, you need to be in the office, you have to be in the office.

The fact is that bosses like to have people on the premises.

I've spent most of my career as an editor, an editor-in-chief, and I like to have people in the office.

And there's something to be said.

I totally am very empathetic to the idea of culture and mentorship and creativity and all of those things.

But that said, there is a reason why hybrid remote work remains so prevalent.

And the reason is that it works.

News reports of companies mandating in-person work have been dominating headlines recently, with studies also highlighting crackdowns on the coffee badging trend.

Owl Labs data shows 44 percent of hybrid employees still coffee badge.

That's down 24 percent from 2023.

Meanwhile, 70 percent of coffee badgers have been caught, with 16 percent now forced to be in office for the full day.

Interestingly, some companies are also using badge data or swipe data as a tool to promote, demote or even lay off employees.

So I wrote a book called The Algorithm about how AI is used in the workforce, you know, to hire people, but also to monitor employees.

And one of the folks that I talked to was an analyst at Gartner.

One of the companies he was working with, what they did is they looked at like, you know, we want to find the people that we haven't really promoted before.

How can we do this?

So this company came up with this idea to look at batch data.

So the people who batched in early and batched out late, who had like very long hours at the desk, were supposed to be more promotable than others.

And the fortunate thing about that company was also when the pandemic hit and they started to have to do layoffs, they wanted to look at this kind of badging in, badging out data to understand who are the people that leave early, that have the fewest hours in the seats, and they were going to look at those to lay off.

The push by some companies against flexible work is apparent in job postings with fewer remote roles.

LinkedIn data shows flexible work stabilizing at one in five listings since November 2023, down from a peak of over one in four between October 2022 and March of 2023.

Indeed's chart also shows a decline in remote and hybrid job listings since their 2022 peak.

As the world reopened post-pandemic, corporate America shifted its stance on remote work.

Companies like Amazon now mandate employees to return to the office five days a week or risk losing their jobs.

Companies Cloud chief Matt Garman saying during an all hands meeting that staffers who don't agree with the policy, well, they can leave.

According to the transcript that was viewed by CNBC, he said the following in quotes, if there are people who just don't work well in that environment and don't want to, that is OK.

There are other companies around.

You know, there are a lot of employers, I'm saying small to midsize employers who are waiting on a juggernaut like Amazon to officially go ahead and push forward with a five day work policy because their bank account is basically the size of a small country's account.

And this is just an Amazon attitude is if you don't like it, go someplace else.

Other employers, and I'm hearing this behind closed doors, employers are really happy that Amazon is pushing this because if Amazon's doing it now, we can follow suit.

I don't think that the five day work week is something that you're going to see generally.

It's the fact that Amazon has opted to go that direction doesn't necessarily mean that everybody is going to move in lockstep with what they did.

One of the reasons employers can get more workers back into the office, because there just isn't as much mobility as there was a few years ago.

You don't see as many workers moving.

And in fact, two in five workers tell us that they feel stuck in their job.

Amazon, who's now mandating all of their employees come back five days a week and employees have been up in arms about that.

They don't want that.

They want to keep their flexibility.

It remains to be seen if this is going to have a huge ripple effect, if other employers are going to mandate the same thing.

CNBC reached out to Amazon regarding its five day office work policy.

The company stated that the policy was needed to ensure that its team stays connected to invent, collaborate and deliver the best results for its customers and business.

The push against remote work isn't limited to companies.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, are proposing a five day in office work week for federal employees, raising doubts about the future of flexible work and the coffee badging trend.

Yeah, when I look at the future of flexible work, here's what I see.

Depending on the industry, flexible work might be the thing to be.

You know, if you happen to work in a technological industry, you can work remotely.

It doesn't necessarily require that you to come in the office versus if you're in a human resources function, if you're a warehouse function.

If you're in something, director of operations, that's going to force you to continue to come into work because you need to be hands on.

So what we're essentially going to see in the future, the future is going to look a lot like the past.

It's very clear when you look at the data on LinkedIn that employees prefer flexible work.

So they're going to be looking for those hybrid options, those remote options wherever they can get them.

And they're going to be looking to make work work for them, as they did during the pandemic.

I think the coffee badging phenomenon is indicative of the type of adjustments that we're going to see going forward as we see a normalization of the relationship between employees and employers and expectations about whether people will be working at home or whether they'll be working in the office.

So I think that it's perhaps a symptom of that, those types of adjustments as workers kind of seek out what are the appropriate norms with their employers and as employees kind of seek out just how much engagement they need with their employees to have them be productive and well connected to their enterprise.

Coffee badging exists and will continue to exist because employees are looking for that level of flexibility to be able to choose the environment that allows them to be most productive and it gives them the best flexibility.

But it is also a way for them to be able to meet the return to office mandate that they're company has.