Food – The secret to create and maintain a great workplace for your employees.
Capricorn, Australasia’s largest automotive cooperative, has more than 23,000 automotive business owner Members across Australia and New Zealand. That translates to many more hungry staff to keep healthy, happy and alert when at work.
While there are so many employee engagement theories being used by businesses, there is one rather obvious one that tends to get overlooked – food.
While food and eating is a basic human requirement for survival, it is also something that is incredibly social as we naturally tend to eat in groups. This makes food and eating a very powerful tool to help create and maintain an excellent workplace culture.
Massively successful companies like Google and Facebook identified the workplace culture power of food several years ago, providing their staff members with lunch and healthy foods to eat all day every day.
Accepting that every small business cannot take it to that extent, there are the following food related ideas that you might like to leverage with your own team, no matter how large or small.
Make lunchtime an event. Eating lunch together in a designated place is brilliant for building relationships between staff members and management. It encourages open communication and it is also a chance to chat and get to know each other better. If you really want to supercharge that feeling of camaraderie, consider providing the lunch for your staff. It doesn’t have to be every day, perhaps just once a week or month, but it will help to put everyone in a great mood. It also helps to make staff members feel more valued, which also leads to longer staff retention.
“ACCORDING TO WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION RESEARCH, EATING HEALTHY FOOD DURING THE DAY CAN BOOST YOUR BRAIN POWER BY AS MUCH AS 20 PER CENT.”
Similarly, providing a well-stocked snack bar with free and healthy foods to eat not only creates excellent goodwill within your team, it can also improve productivity. According to World Health Organisation research, eating healthy food during the day can boost your brain power by as much as 20 per cent. This is opposed to staff members heading off to the shop to get energy drinks and chocolate bars during breaks which lead to a blood sugar spike and the inevitable crash that then makes them lethargic and unproductive.
Providing options like nuts, dried fruit and protein bars, will give your team members an energy boost without the crash effect. Another option is to offer any fresh fruit with a decent shelf life that is quick and easy to eat such as bananas or easy-peel mandarins.
Food is also a great way to reward the team for a record sales result or to give someone who has earned it a hearty pat on the back to celebrate a milestone.
If you’re ready to embrace the idea that the way to an employee’s heart is through their stomach and you’re keen to leverage the power of food to build a great workplace culture, then taking advantage of Capricorn’s alliance with Woolworths at Work is a must.
Woolworths at Work is now available to Capricorn Members, which means you can order groceries and everyday essentials from Woolworths on your trade account and have them delivered directly to your workshop. This makes it so easy to have quality food available at your workplace, promoting a healthier and more rewarding working environment for your team.
Capricorn Members earn reward points with every dollar spent and get free next day delivery when they spend more than $99 (where available), while also enjoying Woolworth’s “Fresh or its Free Guarantee”. This is a smarter, easier and healthier way to shop and a very easy way to create and maintain an excellent workplace culture through good food.
To find out more visit www.capricorn.coop/shop.