Were you a coffee badger or a rage applier? Here are the workplace trends that dominated 2023

Forget the classic Monday blues; 2023 was about "Bare Minimum Mondays." It's that vibe where you stroll into work, fashionably late, after a solid morning of self-care rituals. The mantra? Do enough to get by without breaking a sweat. It's all about keeping the work stress on the down-low while still making it through the day.

The term was coined by TikTok creator Marisa Jo, who has 154,000 followers on the platform.

Jo, in her series of videos about the trend, described it as a way for her to calm down the work pressure and hold herself accountable to “completing the least amount of work necessary to get by that day.” In an interview with Insider, she explained that she thought of BMM while experiencing the "Sunday scaries" — dreading the workweek ahead — and “realised something had to change.”

In March 2022, she allowed herself to do the absolute bare minimum work on Monday, and to her, it felt like a magic spell on all the workplace anxiety. As a result, she described feeling better and getting more done than expected.

Picture this: you stroll into the office, grab your caffeine fix, shoot the breeze with your work buddies, and then bounce. That's "coffee badging" for you getting a virtual badge for just showing up. Swipe your ID, make an appearance, sip some coffee, and off you go.

Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs in Boston, told Fox Business that this involves workers showing up just long enough for a coffee, a brief appearance, and a badge swipe before heading home to continue their work remotely.

Owl Labs, specialising in video conferencing devices, delved into this trend in their 2023 State of Hybrid Work report. The findings reveal that only 22% of employees globally prefer full-time office work, with 37% seeking hybrid options, and 41% preferring complete remote work.

Additionally, 58% of hybrid workers are currently "coffee badging," with 8% expressing interest in trying it.

Got a case of workplace blues? Enter "rage-applying." When you're fed up, you just start applying to every job in sight. Canadian millennial Redweez even made it famous with nearly two million views. In short, it means sending out your resume to quite a few companies at the same time in an attempt to quickly find a new job with a hefty pay hike.

Social media marketer Redweez, a TikTok user from Canada, shared her experience of applying to 15 jobs after workplace-related rage and landing a job which offered a $25,000 raise last December.

Garnering millions of views, further led to many users vouching for the trend by sharing their successful stories of securing jobs with hefty hikes and perks.

Here's to the digital work revolution! Lazy girl jobs are all about having a life outside the 9-to-5 grind. It's the dream: a low-stress gig that pays the bills without taking over your entire world. Because, let's be real, life's about balance, right?

The trend was made popular on TikTok by influencer Gabriel Judge. Judge defines lazy girl jobs as something that you can basically “quiet quit”. She said in a viral video there are a lot of jobs out there where one could make 60-80 thousand and not do much work and be remote. She said there are many non-technical tech roles like a marketing associate, some type of account manager or a customer success manager that are very good lazy girl jobs.

In another video, she shared her views and said having a 9 to 5n job is still cool but having a job where you can exercise work-life balance and not be bound by fixed working hours is truly a lazy girl job. She also shared how she has a lazy girl jobs programme that aims to help women find such jobs.

“And what we mean as lazy girl is a safe, high-paying, remote job that provides a safety net. Women are powerful beautiful and creative when we aren’t worrying about money. We have so many resources on how to get your next lazy girl job,” Judge wrote on Instagram.

Quiet Hiring was the trend that started in early 2023. It was even named one of the nine workplace trends of the year by technology research and consulting firm Gartner. Quiet hiring has been in the industry for a long time but, true to character, it has stayed pretty quiet.

It’s a tactic that companies use to get new skills in their workforce without hiring new employees.

Quiet hiring starts with the company assessing its current workforce. With this, the organisation finds employees who have been working above and beyond their job description.

When the company sees the worker's input and performance, it gives them a raise or promotion, thus saving the worker a job search as well as saving the company money on the hiring process.

When executives witness counterparts at other companies implementing workforce reductions, they often reflexively follow suit. Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer refers to this phenomenon as "copycat layoffs," shedding light on the widespread terminations affecting the tech (and media) sector in 2022 and 2023.

"The tech industry layoffs are essentially a case of social contagion, where companies mimic the actions of others," explained Pfeffer to Stanford News in December. "If you seek reasons for why companies resort to layoffs, it's because everyone else is doing it. Layoffs result from imitative behaviour and lack substantial evidence-based reasoning."

This refers to the scenario where someone shows up for work physically but is mentally or emotionally absent. This disconnect may stem from resentment towards the employer, colleagues, or the workplace, adversely impacting the overall work atmosphere and diminishing productivity.

Employers are growing more apprehensive about continual absenteeism due to its potential consequences, including increased turnover, deteriorating morale, and reduced overall job satisfaction.

Well, this is the rebellious younger sibling of quiet quitting. It involves leveraging your work position to assist customers, even if it means a slight inconvenience for the company or organisation.

In a TikTok video by "The Speech Prof," examples include offering employee discounts, generously distributing complimentary tickets obtained through work to random individuals, waiving overdraft fees, or upgrading a food order. This rebellious work approach gained a lot of traction in 2023 amassing over 97,000 likes and around 2,000 comments in just a few weeks. Embracing the chaos, this trend challenges traditional workplace norms in pursuit of a more customer-centric ethos.