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 isn’t going to be seen as an enjoyable amenity and won’t be a place people want to spend time when away from their desks.

A micro market is the obvious solution to this problem. When a standard break room area is upgraded into a micro market, it will immediately become a hub of activity in the office and deliver a number of benefits—some of which you may expect and some that may be surprising. 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: Commonly, the break room is tucked away in a corner, filling up a space that otherwise wouldn’t be used for much. By definition, this leads to a break room that isn’t very enjoyable for workers to visit and may not wind up getting used much at all. If there is only one door in and out of the break room, people may simply not walk in there often, and the whole thing will be mostly wasted.

No Food Available: A standard break room doesn’t have anything available in terms of food or drinks; it’s just a room where people can eat food they brought from home or purchased elsewhere. Even if the break room does have a refrigerator and a microwave, it’s still necessary for employees to remember to bring things with them if the break room is going to be at all useful.

Little Interaction: This goes right along with the issue of the break room being a closed-off, unappealing space. If the room isn’t somewhere where people want to spend time, they aren’t likely to stay long, if they even stop by at all. That means that 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 a big opportunity to have stronger relationships formed within your organization.

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. But if a traditional break room tends to fall short, what is the future of workplace amenities? 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 include food and drink options for your people to consider. A wide assortment of snacks and beverages can be included in your micro market’s inventory, and that collection of options can easily be customized to fit the preferences of your employees. 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!