Coffee: Your Office's Secret Ingredient

Why You Need Coffee In Your Office

It shouldn't surprise anyone that coffee is a key part of American office culture. In a world where the average person goes to work as the sun rises and doesn't get home until the sun sets, caffeine is often a necessary part of a long work day. However, it's not just about staying awake. Over the last few decades, hundreds of scientific studies have demonstrated that coffee is beneficial for American productivity in more ways than one.

1. Productivity: The goal of practically every company around the world is to maximize productivity and efficiency in the office. However, creating a perfectly efficient workplace isn't just down to timetables and status meetings. As it turns out, supplying your office with a readily available source of caffeine is one of the key methods to keeping your office ship-shape.

In fact, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Braun's book Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine explains that caffeine actually blocks adenosine receptors. According to Dr. Ananya Mandal, these receptors would normally bind with adenosine, which leads to rising sleepiness throughout the day as long as you are awake. As a result, drinking coffee effectively prevents adenosine from building up in the brain during the work day, helping to keep your employees alert and active.

In the end, keeping coffee in the office won't just prevent employees from snoozing at their desk. It will also help them to stay focused on projects and remain attentive during meetings, progress which will stay with your company long after your employees have finished their morning mug.

2. Social Buy-In: Loyal employees are often the best employees, but true loyalty rarely comes from loyalty to the product the company produces. Rather, it originates from a feeling of comradery amongst the employees and especially through appreciation for their boss. In this area, providing an office coffee station can help in more ways than one.

Whereas it may seem like just a simple coffee maker, you're actively replacing the long-outdated water cooler phenomena. In essence, providing coffee in-house discourages your employees from taking their breaks retrieving coffee themselves. Taking the travel and lines out of the equation reduces overly long breaks and encourages them to spend their break chatting with other employees.

It is in these conversations that social buy-in occurs. In essence, chatting around the coffee maker develops important friendships between colleagues, which will help to form the basis of your employees' loyalty to the company they all work for. Their performance ceases to be about individual contribution and becomes a collective effort that they can use to continue maintaining the friendships they made around your coffee maker. In the long run, Business Insider notes, this allows a coffee break area to become a collaborative space where employees begin to correlate their service to the company and the support they wish to extend the friends they have made.

3. Hiring: The Harvard Business Review's study of the most desirable employee benefits lists free coffee at the #13 slot among all of the benefits most valued by job seekers, beating out far more lavish benefits including company-wide retreats and on-site gyms. In fact, a full 30% of all polled job seekers admitted that they take free coffee into consideration. The benefits that outranked coffee on the survey include better health plans and parental leave, both of which cost the company far more than maintaining a good coffee offering.

Fortunately, the benefits of keeping office coffee aren't limited to adding a little extra appeal to your hiring package. A recent interview approach demonstrates that coffee can also be used as a tool to see whether or not a potential candidate will fit into the office culture you're aiming to create. The Mirror, as well as uncountable other news sources, report on the infamous coffee mug trick as an easy way to tell if an interviewee is willing to add value into your company. Simply put, if the candidate accepts a cup of coffee, you learn an awful lot about them based on whether or not they offer to wash it before they leave.

Essentially, having coffee on hand is helpful to attracting strong candidates while also helping you to identify whether or not they will ultimately hold themselves to a high standard while in your employ. Additionally, it's a gift that keeps on giving in terms of productivity, alertness, loyalty, and even the individual morale of your employees, all which help your bottom line for pennies on the dollar.

4. Morale: Although the “happy worker” thesis came under some fire in the late 1980s and 1990s, more recent research published in the peer-reviewed journals, Management Studies and Work & Stress, fully support the thesis' reconsideration. Both articles use empirical data to argue that the overall economic health of a company is partially based on employee happiness due to the direct correlation with their productivity.

As caffeine is a popularly consumed stimulant, providing coffee in the workplace doesn't just boost alertness, it boosts your employees' moods and shows them that you care about their basic needs. In the latest study published by Reuters, a full 64% of Americans drink at least one cup of coffee every day. By providing coffee in-house, you're providing a daily treat for at least 64% of your workforce and keeping them alert during the busiest times of year.

Furthermore, the Norwegian National Institute of Occupational Health 2012 study showed that coffee consumption may help to block certain pain receptors, which are often responsible for pain issuing from repetitive tasks. In the study, office workers who drank coffee were less likely to feel pain or discomfort after working for long hours, helping to keep those workers comfortable and happy at their desks.

5. Improvement: So far the benefits of coffee are mostly common sense mixed with very well-known science; however, recent research into the benefits of caffeine in relation to memory and learning is fairly new and could be ground-breaking in the business world. Apparently, caffeine doesn't just boost attentiveness. Drinking coffee after learning something new actually improves the memory of that learning experience, making it easier for the person to learn a new task or remember vital information.

One study, published in Nature Neuroscience by Johns Hopkins Professor Dr. Yassa, demonstrated that individuals showed better recollection of a series of patterned images if they drank two cups of coffee immediately after their initial exposure. As of now, these studies have been limited to memory retention over a period of 24 hours. However, that is more than enough time to take a new employee through the next step in their training the following day.

Bringing It All Together

Depending on the coffee service you choose to provide to your employees, the cost can range from $50 to $200 per employee per year. The wide range in cost is determined by the quality of the coffee provided and whether or not you'll be using coffee pods over a traditional coffee pot. That being said, free coffee is still one of the cheapest and most important benefits you can provide to your employees, while maximizing the benefit to the company as a whole.