Nourishing Employees in the Post Covid World
Solution that is win-win for both employees and employers
The Covid-19 pandemic has made 2020 and 2021 challenging for businesses all around the world. To curb the spread of the virus, governments around the world have implemented regional and national lockdowns, enforced social distancing measures, and closed a number of businesses deemed to be “non-essential”.
However, now the spread of the virus has slowed down in most of the countries and the vaccine drive is in full swing, more and more businesses are resuming operations. Employees are starting to head back to their offices, albeit under new health and safety restrictions regarding workplace conduct.
As businesses around the world open up their offices and employees start returning, they find that their workspaces are not the same as they left behind. Strict social distancing norms masks, thermal screening, and sanitization tunnels is the new normal.
Similar changes are being seen at the hub of all action -The Cafeteria. Once the focal point of all office interactions and buzz, sharing snacks and food has now become passé with the adoption of staggered lunch hours and other restrictions. To protect the employees, companies have opted to restrict cafeterias; asking employees to bring their own food from home and have opted to invest in new technology offerings like Automated Micro Retail Cafes which can be placed at multiple locations in the office buildings and offer a wide range of meals, snacks, beverages and other essentials to their employees.
The risks of virus transmission inside traditional cafeterias broadly fall into three areas:
- Transmission due to overcrowding & lack of social distancing, especially during peak (lunch) hours
- Transmission due to handling of currency notes used for placing orders inside cafeterias
- Transmission due to food or staff involved in cafeteria operations and food distributions.
Automated Micro Retail Cafes provide the smartest and safest solution. These automated cafes are contactless, digital, 24×7 open channel for employees to purchase food, snacks, beverages, and other essentials while focussing on their work. After the coronavirus outbreak, there is increased adoption of these micro retail cafes across industries. A Touchless Experience and Contactless Checkout: Micro retail cafes offer a touch-free checkout using QR codes – customers simply point their phone camera to the screen and are instantly directed to a website through which they can control the machine in real-time. They can then select products, view information, and checkout. There is also a foot operated product retrieval flap, eliminating touchpoints in the purchasing experience. These automated solutions also eliminate all human contact in the process of refilling the stock in the kiosks due to the stringent protocols followed. Another added advantage is that these Automated Micro Retail Kiosks require very little real estate space(less than 9 square feet, that’s less than what your office table consumes btw!) and they can be conveniently scaled up as the footfalls increase. Remember the days of the early 2000s when the debate was prevalent whether children should be allowed to work on computers and gadgets? Nowadays, it is difficult to even comprehend why such debate was necessary as it is difficult to imagine anyone without a gadget in their hand. Similar futile debates happened about mobile phones in the late 2000s. Can you afford to have that debate now? Similarly, the debate is not whether Automated Micro Retail Café would become an integral part of the offices or not because they will! It is simply now the question of when it will happen. The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged organizations to adopt new technology for the safety and well-being of their employees and their nourishment. As offices are
switching to a hybrid model of working (WFH + Office), it is a financially wise decision to switch from a conventional manpower intensive cafeteria model to Smart Micro Retail Cafes. The sooner, the better!
