Whether you are a HR Manager, Office Manager or your role means dealing with the workplace facilities that improve your workplace environment, finding the ‘sweet spot’ for workplace wellness can be challenging. With 35% of employees reporting the stress they experience at work is having a negative impact on them, it’s more important than ever to focus your investments on improving employee wellbeing. In this blog article, we’ll provide you with our top workplace wellness ideas including healthy vending solutions to the benefits of having a micro market within your workplace.
What is an example of a micro market?
Put simply, a micro market for workplace and office environments is a self-serviced retail space (visually similar to a small supermarket with self checkouts), offering a wide variety of snacks, beverages and fresh food options to your employees. Unlike a typical vending machine, micro markets provide a full experience for your staff to be able to choose refreshments, no matter what time of the day with cashless transactions. This makes having a micro market the ideal solution for businesses working around the clock such as universities, large hotels, serviced offices and healthcare establishments.
What are the features of a micro market?
A micro market’s open layout features a mixture of smart fridges, vending machines, office coffee machine stations, hot food stations fitted with microwaves, instant water taps and shelving units to hold snacks. Making this the perfect solution to browse and shop for products like they would do when visiting a regular shop on the high street without the need to leave the premises.
How are micro markets managed?
Depending on the vending provider you partner with for your micro market break out area, typically they are fully managed by your provider.
Here at Vending Sense, our micro market vending service is fully managed. Meaning we have a team of dedicated operators that attend your site(s) to restock, monitor and keep your area maintained at all times.
The benefits of having a micro market onsite
Whether your business is operating 24 hours a day, or you simply would like to enhance your overall employee wellbeing in the workplace, a micro market can provide plenty of benefits to justify the investment.
Provide convenient and healthy snack options onsite
Firstly, you’ll be providing your team with convenient food options. When associated with vending machines, it’s easy to assume you’ll be providing unhealthy food options such as fizzy drinks, sweets and crisps. Whilst this can be partly true, healthy micro market vending is on the rise to provide healthy food options within the workplace. Here at Vending Sense, we provide a consumables service with a range of healthy snack options such as protein bars, porridge pots, fresh food such as sandwiches and salads from well-known reputable brands, and more. Making your micro market the best of both worlds with options to suit your entire team. Find out more about the rise of health-conscious vending.
Improve employee wellbeing and satisfaction
Another key benefit to installing a workplace micro market is the improvement to your employee wellbeing. Whilst your team are working (occasionally) around the clock, it’s important to encourage high morale. Having a custom breakroom area for your team is one of the key ways to encourage engagement and positive social connections between coworkers. As a result, you will see increased productivity and reduced meal-related disruptions.
Increased food safety within the workplace
Food safety is a huge focus for both you and us here at Vending Sense. Especially when catering to specific dietary needs to ensure your workplace is a safe space to purchase food from. That’s why we partner with third-party testing to ensure all the refreshments we supply abide by Natasha’s Law, increasing the transparency within the products bought from your micro market, protecting both you and your team members.
Are micro markets profitable?
One of the key benefits of investing in a micro market solution, is the profitability impact it can have on the business. Not only can you save money on the existing catering costs that may get replaced due to your micro market, overtime you will also see the profitability of the products you sell on a daily basis. Find out how our customers at The London Fire Brigade saved £1 million by removing their inhouse catering and installing a micro market here.
How to implement a micro market
It may sound like a daunting task to implement an entire micro market in your workplace, however the key factors you need to consider are the space you have available, liaising with your vending provider to customise the design of your market and wrapping up any catering solutions that your micro market will replace.
At Vending Sense, we’ll do all the heavy lifting to ensure your workload is kept to a minimum. Once we have the dimensions for your micro market – whether it’s covering one small wall of your office, or an entire workplace breakroom – we’ll get cracking on the layout and design of your micro market to work alongside your team of micro market specialists to ensure we’re utilising your space as efficiently as possible.
Once the bespoke design for your micro market is customised and the machines you need are incorporated, we’ll get to work on getting your installation underway. You’ll also work alongside our friendly Operations team to decipher which consumables are best suited for your environment to ensure you’re fully stocked up with the refreshments your team will enjoy.
We like to see ourselves as a partner to your business. Once the initial installation takes its way, our team will work as an extension of yours to gather feedback and monitor the performance of your machines and products to stock the micro market with those that are performing well and change the ones that aren’t selling as well as they should. This ensures that your micro market will continuously improve its revenue and usage.
Overall, the importance of investing in workplace culture and well-being is paramount and exploring micro market solutions can be the key to tackling these business challenges. Providing both employee satisfaction, convenience and profitability to your everyday business runnings, implementing a micro market is a no brainer.
Enquire today and find out more about partnering on a micro market vending service with Vending Sense.