VENDING & WATER COOLERS COFFEE: ARE
YOU GIVING IT THE BEANS?
Great coffee can make a significant difference between a good or a bad workplace, says Barry Moore, Performance Director for Gather & Gather.
Coffee is about far more than providing a hot drink and for millions of discerning Britons, it is now focused much more on the overall experience, catering for a more sophisticated and educated palate. Walk down any high street and you can see the evidence; coffee is now an inherent part of UK society and millennials are in fact more likely to meet over a coffee than an alcoholic beverage.
This is probably why the high street now has more coffee shops than pubs. In the past 17 years, according to data supplied by Retail Locations, CBRE found that the number of coffee shop chains rose from 215 to 4,234. There has been an evolution in coffee culture as drinkers have become more sophisticated in their tastes and as a result the UK coffee industry turned over around £7.2bn in 2014 (Allegra Strategies).
This taste for great coffee has extended into the work place. People no longer accept a kettle and a cupboard stocked with instant coffee as the norm. This means that employers, and FMs, need to make informed decisions about how to meet that demand in order to effectively support workplace strategy.
The simple fact is that the workplace needs to compete with the high street. Today’s modern coffee outlets consider much more than great quality product and aim to create “third space” environments that are equally suited to working as they are for socialising.
26 | TOMORROW’S FM
This means that workplace coffee needs to be experiential too; served somewhere upbeat and dynamic from engaged, knowledgeable and welcoming staff and to customers free to move around and dwell in spaces of their choosing rather than just forced to sit at their desks during core working hours. Great coffee can drive foot fall and support collaboration and socialising, all essential elements for a workplace strategy that embraces wellbeing.
This also means that the return on investment, which has traditionally been measured on fit out costs versus subsidy savings, is in fact more than simply financial. Workplace effectiveness, wellbeing strategies and employee engagement can all be influenced by a great coffee offer.
It
also means the traditional contract catering style of fit-out is no longer good enough and FMs need to be forward thinking enough to embrace more retail design-led solutions.
Anya Marco, Allegra’s director of research and insights, said: “We can see how many contract caterers have become very aware of the impact of the branded coffee shop market…leading to significant investment into coffee and beverage strategies.”
It’s also why at so many of the FM, workplace or HR events taking place, people are discussing how better designed, higher performing workplaces with engaged employees will make any organisation more productive.
twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
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