From microshifting to coffee badging: whatever happened to just doing your job?

There’s another hot trend in the workplace – microshifting, and it’s about to revolutionize the workday by breaking the traditional 9-to-5 into short, flexible and non-linear bursts of activity rather than a continuous 8-hour stretch. Microshifting allows for a better work-life balance. Why not do a yoga class or pop to the shops during work hours? I mean, what is “work” anyway?
Like bare minimum Mondays, where workers recuperating from weekend hangovers allow themselves to accomplish the least amount the day after, or coffee badging, which involves taking the time out of the workday to protest an employer’s in-office requirements by driving into the office, swiping your badge, having a coffee, then taking more time out of the workday to drive back home, it used to have another name, as the Guardian noted earlier this year: “Taking the piss.”
Sadly, these are only a few of the trends that have allegedly been taking the workplace – and the media – by storm over the past few years.
We’ve read about quiet quitting, where employees allow themselves to expend no extra effort to accomplish what is expected of them, because they’re ostensibly keeping an eye on the open door for other opportunities. There’s career cushioning, where, instead of doing their jobs, employees spend a portion of their workdays lining up backup opportunities for other jobs.
Quiet vacationing involves taking time off without formally requesting it. Or, in other words, playing while on the clock. Task masking is when you’re looking productive – attending meetings, sending work messages – while actually not doing anything. Quiet cracking has been offered as a mental health excuse for disengaging with your responsibilities, and resenteeism is when employees stay at a job they dislike – and I assume not doing well at it – if only to wait out the current wave of economic uncertainty.
Aren’t we all just a little tired of these trends? We’ve been inundated with them and, although they appear different on the surface, it’s all about the same thing: not working.
Microshifting is essentially not doing work so that you can use the time to do other things. Coffee badging means not doing work so you can come into the office so that you get credit for being at work. Bare minimum Mondays means not doing work on Mondays. Well ... you get the point.
Whatever happened to actually working?
When a company hires an employer to do a job there’s an implied assumption that the employee will actually do their job. Quiet quitting, quiet vacationing and career cushioning are all activities that are the opposite of doing your job. All of these trends share the common trait of avoiding work. Yet none of them seem to require that the employer pays the employee less money while they’re avoiding work. In fact, it’s implied that while the employee avoids doing their actual work, the paychecks keep coming.
Employers get accused frequently of wage theft when they fail to remit tips, overtime pay or mandated time off. But doesn’t that apply to employees too? When an employee spends their time not doing work because they’re quiet cracking or participating in resenteeism, it means they’re stealing money from their employer. But rather than post this on social media, or deep diving into a subreddit, most employers ultimately find a way to terminate that employee – quietly and (hopefully) without fuss.
These trends have been great for the cottage of industry of academics, journalists, HR teams and workplace “experts” who love offering their thoughts on why the latest movement is so important for employers to understand, and how ignoring these things will cause permanent, infinite harm to our businesses and our ability to attract and retain talent. But most employers I know see right through these explanations.
The economy has slowed, the job market has softened and a looming threat of mass unemployment hangs in the air thanks to AI. But there will always be a strong demand for workers who have the right attitude, work hard, display discipline and simply get their jobs done. People who succeed aren’t microshifting, coffee badging or working bare minimum Mondays. They’re working. Actually working.
Which is why I’m sincerely hoping that we’re done with these silly non-working trends.