From Break Room to Micro Market: How to Upgrade Your Workplace Amenities

The amenities you offer in your workplace have a profound impact on the overall employee experience. An office that features plenty of attractive, enjoyable amenities will make coming to work each day more enjoyable, and your people will be more likely to stick around for the long haul.

One great candidate for a meaningful upgrade is the traditional break room. In some offices, the break room is little more than an empty space with a few chairs and tables, a microwave, and an old fridge. That kind of space can technically get the job done, but it won’t be a place people will want to spend much time in when they’re away from their desks

A micro market is a great solution to this problem. When a standard break room area is upgraded to a micro market, it delivers a number of meaningful benefits (some of which you may expect and others that may be surprising) and immediately becomes a hub of activity in the office. Contact InReach today to learn more about micro markets and how this amenity can easily be added to your building!

Upgrading Your Workplace Amenities

A Few Common Break Room Problems

The standard break room has a few problems.

A Closed-Off Space: Traditional break rooms are often tucked away in a corner, functioning more as an afterthought. And with a single entrance plus little natural flow, the space can feel closed off and uninviting. As a result, employees may avoid it altogether.

No Food Available: No Food Available: In many standard break rooms, there’s no convenient access to food or drinks. Employees must bring everything from home or leave the building to find what they want. Even with a refrigerator and microwave, the space still depends on employees remembering to pack something. And when people leave the building in search of more satisfying coffee, snacks, or meals, it disrupts productivity and can pull them away from on-site collaboration.

Little Interaction: If the room isn’t someplace where people want to spend time, they are unlikely to stay very long. That means the kinds of impromptu, organic conversations that can pop up in a more appealing, enjoyable space won’t be happening, and you’ll be missing out on the kind of camaraderie that strengthens workplace culture.

What is the future of workplace amenities? It’s important to have a place within your office for people to take a break from their desks, enjoy a snack or meal, and recharge for the rest of the day. Providing an excellent employee experience is going to require a different approach to workplace amenities, and that approach can be found in the form of a micro market.

What You Stand to Gain With a Micro Market

You can take everything we listed above and turn it on its head with the addition of a micro market in your office. By turning the old break room space into a micro market with the help of InReach, you’ll suddenly be left with an amenity that employees love to use and will become the hub of social activity within the office.

For starters, unlike most break rooms, micro markets from InReach offer a wide assortment of snacks, meals, and beverages. And you can customize your inventory to fit your employees’ preferences. Using our smart stocking tools, back-of-house management is automated so that over time, restocking will be optimized based on user behaviors.

While it’s great to have food and drinks available for your employees to purchase right there in the office, those options are just part of what the micro market brings to the table. Perhaps just as important is the interactions that you will start to see happening shortly after the market is opened.

Since people will be drawn to the space for its attractive design and tasty products, more and more people will be interacting with one another as the day goes by. Those interactions will be spontaneous and have the potential to bring people together who would never have otherwise connected. In the long run, that leads to a stronger social fabric within the business and a team that is better able to work together to serve customers and clients. Additionally, thanks to enhanced social connections, people may be more likely to remain in your business for longer, reducing turnover and the significant costs associated with hiring new employees regularly. 

Why InReach Is the Best Choice

This all sounds great, so why have so many businesses been stuck with the old ways of running a basic break room for so long? It comes down to convenience—or, more accurately, a lack thereof. It isn’t easy to operate something like a micro market that needs to be consistently restocked when you have plenty of other things on your to-do list as an owner or manager.

That has all changed with InReach. By working with us, the responsibility of managing the micro market is taken off of your plate and put into the hands of our capable and experienced team. We’ll make sure your micro market is always living up to its potential so you can enjoy the benefits while being able to keep your attention fully tuned to your core responsibilities.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that we’ll be bringing a one-size-fits-all approach to your micro market. For each client, we take the time necessary to get to know their space and understand how that space can be utilized to best serve the people who work in it. Customization is at the heart of what we do, and it is the reason we have been able to serve so many clients so effectively.

Enjoy the InReach Difference

Not only is the addition of amenities in the workplace, like a micro market, a powerful way to impress your employees and make their days more enjoyable, but the whole process is made easy by partnering with InReach. We’ll customize this space to perfectly match the needs of your business and your people and continually adjust the product mix for optimum performance. Take a moment to get in touch today, and let’s get started!