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AUTOMATIC MERCHANDISER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Anant Agrawal Cantaloupe Systems Brad Ellis Crane Co. Carl Moser Cardinal Canteen Food Service Chuck Reed Crane Payment Innovations (CPI) Elyssa Allahyar-Steiner Avanti Markets Inc. Jeff Whitacre Food Express Jim Carbone The Classic Group/Chicago Coffees & Teas Jodi Glimpse Camelback Vending Joe Hessling 365 Retail Markets Lee Hartnett Commercial Coffee Service/ Food Systems Inc. Michael Miller Mondelez International Paresh Patel PayRange Paul Schlossberg D/FW Consulting Sandy Thornton VendEdge The Link Between Productivity And Refreshments Happiness and collaboration should be among your top productivity discussion points. INCREASE product- ivity for as little as $2 of free food. Facebook/VendingMarket @VendingMagazine http://linkd.in/VendingMarketWatch n marketing materials we often tout the idea of productivity associated with vend- ing, offce coffee service and micro market service. It's an understandable connection. After all, when locations provide snacks, food and beverages to their employees, it allows them to eat on-site and therefore, not waste time (be unproductive) on traveling to get those essential meals and refreshments. However, is there data to prove this relationship? Turns out there is. Benefts and happiness I recently came across a study from October 2015 that shows that happy peo- ple are more productive. The study: Happiness and productivity: Understand- ing the happy-productive worker, reports that mak- ing people happy results in a measurable improvement in their productivity. The study used two differ- ent forms of happiness- inspiring events. One was a comedy video clip and the other was $2 worth of free food and bever- ages. While the second experiment was with a smaller sample size, the free refreshment actu- ally increased productivity 20 percent, at least for the short-term. For those who were shown the comedy clip, productivity increased 10-12 percent over those who did the same tasks. Regardless of what inspired the happiness, the results were clear. The happier someone was, the more work they did. But how do locations make employees happy? MetLife's 13th Annual U.S. Employee Beneft Trends study talks about how the num- ber of employee benefts offered at a company affects how much they like their place of work, which is certainly an aspect of happiness. The more benefts, the more positive employees are about their employer. Big benefts like insur- ance and compensation are important, but when employees could name more than 11 benefts they were offered, they were the most loyal and appreciative of their work. Benefts like breakroom refreshment, i.e. offce coffee or free snacks, can really add up and are more afford- able than other types of benefts, such as free daycare. MetLife also indicated that keeping employees was important to a large percentage of companies, 41.1 percent, as was increasing productivity, 35.1 percent. Collaboration as a productivity tool Google offers another productivity lesson related to refreshment. In an article titled The Real Reason Google Serves All That Free Food, the author argues that the free refresh- ments and other perks aren't so much to keep employees at work, or even happy, but to increase collaboration. It's this intercommuni- cation between departments and people that leads to successful, and often monetarily proft- able, innovations. Productivity remains a buzzword with deci- sion makers, but when you sit down to really go through the benefts of the services you offer and how it can beneft them, remember to expand the idea not only to keeping employees in the offce, but making them happier and increas- ing collaboration. These have been shown to increase productivity and revenues and will impress your customers. I 8 Automatic Merchandiser VendingMarketWatch.com April 2016 E D I T O R ' S N O T E B Y E M I L Y R E F E R M A T