Think about it:
- If you assume it takes 5 minutes to make each drink (from locking your screen to unlocking again) and every employee has an average of 4 drinks per day - that’s 20 minutes wasted EACH!
- So, if you take a working day as being 7 hours long (9am-5pm minus 1 hour for lunch) you only need 21 employees (21 x 20 minutes) to see a positive ROI from your new hire!
And that’s assuming they’ll earn the same as your average employee and before you factor in that it apparently takes 23 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption (seems steep we know).
They’d only need to make 84 drinks a day or 12 DPH (Drinks Per Hour)* and it avoids the threat of a discrimination claim if you’ve ever been tempted to ask interviewees whether they like hot drinks or not.
But just before you rush off to write that job advert, there are a couple of relevant arguments against recruiting an office barista to consider too.
Firstly, there has been a lot of research on the positive health effects of employees taking regular breaks from their screens, this straight from the HSE’s mouth,
“Every employer shall so plan the activities of users at work in his undertaking that their daily work on display screen equipment is periodically interrupted by such breaks or changes of activity as reduce their workload at that equipment.”
Then there are the theories that taking breaks actually increases productivity and creativity and may even improve overall job satisfaction and wellbeing.
All considered then, it’s fair to say hiring an individual to make drinks for everyone might see employees spend longer at their desks but not necessarily make them more productive. Perhaps a better/more humane approach would be to look at modern wellbeing practices that you can adopt easily and how you measure what has been successful for your organisation.
It is also worth noting that no idea to improve wellbeing or productivity in the office, however outlandish it may seem at the outset, should be rejected offhand. In fact, it is exactly how some of the BEST ideas that HAVE worked were born.
The takeaway point being that, whether we work in HR or not, we should all be more proactive to ensure we are healthy and happy in our roles as well as an asset to our organisations.
Suggest. Consider. Implement. Test. Continue/Desist.
* at the time of writing we were not aware of any formal research into the upper limit of how many hot drinks an individual can make within a certain time frame.