The Coveted Office Treat That’s Tearing Workplaces Apart
Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
If you’ve spent any amount of time in an office, you know that some people—and some offices—are very particular about their coffee. Still, when I started my work advice column, Ask a Manager, I was unprepared for how frequently drama over office coffee would feature in the letters I receive.
You would think supplying employees with coffee would be a relatively straightforward task, and yet … sometimes it’s anything but. Witness this account one person sent me:
My company provides coffee machines on every floor but charges 20 cents per cup (except for “meeting coffee,” which is free). There are lists. People on every floor whose responsibility it is to refill coffee, sugar, and milk. Deputy people for this job. Monthly bills. Cash boxes on every floor where you are supposed to pay your bill. People who manage the cash boxes. Somebody in bookkeeping whose responsibility is to manage cash logistics. Some other person in sales who hands out coffee, sugar, and milk (but needs a receipt for everything). Probably substitutes for these people too. I don’t know—you get the idea.
At some time someone made an official “proposal for improvement” to eliminate the charge for coffee, the lists, the cash boxes, and the whole system: Have a single person whose job it is to refill the coffee machines daily and be done with it. There was a short calculation of how much time and effort could be saved. (A lot.) That proposal has gone through the improvements committee (yes, that’s a thing), the sales people, the union, the CEO, and back to the improvements committee. It is still under consideration after 18 months.
In fact, “coffee clubs” that employees pay to participate in are notoriously tricky:
My last job had a coffee club. I was not a member. There was one coffee maker. There were coffee wars over caffeinated vs. decaf coffee. Regular coffee vs. flavored coffee. Regular caffeinated vs. flavored decaf. This was slightly mitigated when the company expanded to another floor of the building and we gained a second break room and a second coffee maker. One floor’s coffee maker was designated for decaf only, and the other for caffeinated. The flavored vs. regular battle waged on.
Two employees ended up getting disciplined (separately) for spending too much time each day “making coffee.” They were in the kitchen for hours, cleaning the carafe, waiting for coffee to brew, organizing the containers of coffee, walking around polling people about what flavor of coffee to try next.
While simply trying to obtain a cup of coffee for themselves, some workers quickly find themselves burdened by demands to fill other people’s orders to exacting specifications—and they hear about it if they don’t:
There is a coffee shop directly across the street from our office. As a caffeine addict, I usually make a coffee run at least once a day during business hours. I usually ask if anyone else in our office wants anything, and usually people do
However, I’ve become increasingly wary of volunteering to get coffee for others. Some people, including the owner of the firm, rarely pay me back. Others order complex drinks and complain if it’s made incorrectly. For example, one woman routinely orders a medium green tea with one-and-a-half pumps of vanilla and exactly 4 teaspoons of honey. If there is too much or too little honey, I hear about it.
Moreover, going to get coffee for just me takes about five minutes, while getting it for eight to 10 people can take upwards of 20 minutes—time I don’t really have to spare. The other day I went on a coffee run just for me. When I returned to the office, I was met with a chorus of “Why didn’t you get me anything?” Later, I overheard two of our admins complaining about how I hadn’t gotten them coffee.
Then there are the time-consuming battles that managers, who surely have better things to do, get drawn into:
I have an employee who is very particular about his coffee. He has confronted a few people in the lunchroom about mixing pots. When the pots are around half-full, many people will mix the two so that they can brew another pot. The coffee is exactly the same except for being brewed at different times. My employee would rather dump out the older pot and then brew a new pot, leaving one half-full pot.
Some of my co-workers have asked that I speak with him about his wasteful practices with coffee. The guy in question actually complained to me last week about the coffee mixing practices of other people, so I am now hearing it from both sides.
Coffee-related bureaucracy takes up a surprising amount of time in some companies:
At my wife’s work, the company provided a coffee maker and truly terrible coffee. Some enterprising co-workers decided to pool together and bring in a different, much better variety of coffee … except it turned out the terrible coffee and coffeemaker were contracted out to a supplier, who did not authorize third-party coffee in their machine. Could the employees just bring in a second machine? No, they could not, because the contract granted exclusive coffee-making rights to this supplier and they were locked in for at least the next two years.
There were meetings hijacked to discuss the coffee issue. There were meetings scheduled to talk about nothing BUT the coffee issue. Truly ludicrous amounts of time were wasted on the coffee conundrum. I’m talking hundreds of man-hours from people who are paid very nicely per hour, who are willing to go to the mattresses for their coffee.
My wife avoided the issue by bringing her own in the mornings and then, during the day, going downstairs to the cafeteria, where there was a TOTALLY FREE K-CUP MACHINE with a variety of flavors available for use for everyone in the building, including employees of her company.
One person who tried to opt out of the coffee wars by bringing in their own coffee found themselves at the center of the very battle they had been trying to avoid:
I bought my own coffee maker/pot to keep in my office after the brutal territorial battles of the teacher’s workroom became too much for me. Word got around, and now many of my colleagues (in my department, who have access to my office) share my coffee, most of them contributing creamer and coffee.
People around campus are outraged! Outraged that I keep my office locked at all times due to laws that require student documents to be secured. I’ve found sticky notes on the door, asking me to bring coffee to people in their classrooms, had people say rude things to my face, and had multiple administrators come by my office to say, “We’re investigating your office coffeepot on the basis of a complaint. Keep your coffeepot.”
The people who want my coffee are not my friends or close colleagues—they are people I barely know! And nothing is stopping them from using the break room or bringing their own coffeepot.
Things get even worse when you mix in turf wars with other departments or organizations:
We share our space with other organizations, and there used to be one of those touch-screen made-to-order coffee/espresso things on each floor. Then, one of the leaseholders signed a noncompete contract with another company (who served coffee and espresso drinks) that was moving in and we were going to have to get rid of them. Except we weren’t a party to the noncompete, so we bought all the fancy machines and moved them out of public areas and into ours.
At which point people from all the other companies started casually walking into our kitchenettes and using the machines. There were polite reminders. There were pointed barbs: “OH, ARE YOU NEW TO [OUR COMPANY]? WHICH SECTION DO YOU WORK FOR?” There were Post-its. There were signs. Signs got torn down. There were new signs. Someone in the other company took a picture of one of them and sent it to their entire distribution list, inviting them to come drink our coffee. There were executives talking to executives about how to stem the invasion. There was talk of PUTTING BADGE READERS ON THE MACHINES. It was bananas.
When offices expand or improve their coffee offerings, it can set off a hoarding situation similar to what we’ve historically seen with war rations:
Recently, we were the test floor for a new single-serving coffee machine. Imagine a Keurig crossed with the hotel coffee makers that use those flat tea bag–looking things. There was a shelf set up nearby where we had our choice of decaf, French roast, Kona, breakfast blend, salted caramel, and Highlander Grogg. There was a perfect storm of the rest of the building realizing we had the good coffee and the realization that the two most popular flavors would run out quickly.
Half of the floor was hoarding coffee in their desks because “the interlopers” (literally, we called them that) were “pilfering” (also used) our fancy coffee. Those who sat nearest to the elevator would send chats to their team whenever someone they didn’t recognize from our floor got off the elevator and headed toward the kitchenette (also the way to pretty much every conference room), in an attempt to “track thefts.” The other half were hoarding specific flavors. At one point my boss called me over to her desk to show me where she’d stashed an entire box (30 servings) of Highlander Grogg in case I wanted some. It felt like someone on the street with a trenchcoat showing me knockoff watches, literally looking back over her shoulder as if the cops were running a sting and might catch her with the coffee.
If you’re thinking this is a uniquely American tragedy, think again! Even countries less focused on coffee than ours have their own version of these wars. For the Brits, the same dynamics play out with tea:
There was a massive uproar when we younger employees lobbied to be allowed to use our own tea mugs rather than the company-supplied cups and saucers. It was a genuine concern that the tea urn would empty too quickly if larger mugs were permitted, leading to a lengthy consultation period on the optimal mug size.
Clearly, there’s no escaping office beverage wars. We can only aspire to survive them somewhat unscathed—while fully caffeinated, I hope.
