A badge that did not need a caption
Mike Wazowski's employee card is a still from Monsters, Inc.: one eye, a company smile, and the kind of ID photo every office already has on a lanyard. The meme took off because the photo already looked like a badge you would clip on before a shift. People stopped treating it as a movie frame and started treating it as a status.
How it got used
The image shows up when someone is clocking in, when a group chat announces they are "on the job," or when a reply needs to say "I work here" without typing the sentence. It is less a joke about the film and more a joke about having a job at all. That is why it travels outside people who can quote the movie.
The still is easy to crop, easy to recognize at thumbnail size, and already framed like an ID. Those three things are why a 2001 Pixar frame outlived a lot of newer reaction images.
Wearing it
The reference works on a shirt because strangers do not need the plot. They need the badge. ZeitZwag prints that design on the Mike Wazowski ID card tee. More scene-based designs live in the movie collection.
If you want the desk version of the same mood, the work collection is the rest of the clock-in jokes.