Lockdown and working from home: how to digitize the coffee break?
A special break in the working day, the coffee break is a time for relaxation. It’s an opportunity to communicate with colleagues and share information more informally than in meetings.
But with the crisis we’ve been experiencing over the past year, we’ve had to adapt. With distancing measures and the rise of working from home, the virtues of the corporate coffee break are becoming increasingly rare.
So how can you continue to enjoy a social life over a cup of coffee with your colleagues, when you’re working from home? Kabioca offers a few tips on how to digitize your coffee break.
Create your own virtual cafeteria
The virtues of the coffee-break ritual in the workplace have long been recognized: efficiency, intellectual boost, exchange of ideas, a moment to relax… In fact, today a majority of French employees consider it essential to their well-being.
However, with today’s collaboration patterns, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, our habits have been turned upside down. To maintain links between employees during confinement, some companies aren’t hesitating to use augmented reality to materialize a shared 3D space where employees can meet to communicate and take a break.
More enjoyable than Hangouts, Skype or a connected Zoom, these new tools enable qualitative exchanges between colleagues through the use of virtual reality headsets.
A “video” coffee break
More commonly used than virtual reality, interposed screens allow employees to share a coffee and “talk about anything but work”. While the ” Coffee Call ” offers a solution for maintaining contact with the outside world, the smell of a good Arabica or Robusta coffee perfuming the break room is still lacking.
Until researchers are able to add olfactory sensations to the digital world, to enable video-conferencing with the option of espresso, teleworkers will have to make do with discussions through their computer screens, to feel less isolated and maintain regular communication between employees.
How to organize a virtual coffee break
To bring some fun into exchanges, maintain a social link, and perpetuate the continuity of business activity, it seems necessary to set up new rituals for digitalized coffee breaks:
- To create new habits, don’t hesitate to plan as many time slots for your coffee breaks, whether daily or several times a week.
- Use a collaborative videoconferencing tool such as Hangouts, Teams, Zoom, FaceTime or Skype.
- Define the rules of the game for your virtual coffee break: duration, subjects not to be discussed, respective speaking times…
- Get into the mood by having a real coffee.
- While this is not the time to deal with a specific professional subject, such as an agenda or minutes, it does allow you to pass on messages in an informal, unstructured way.
- You can also set up a chat room as a means of informal exchange, allowing you to embellish your discussions with emojis.
Out of sight, close to the heart of business
For a coffee break worthy of the name, the quality of the coffee is essential, and employees are particularly sensitive to this. Remote working can lead to isolation, so it’s important to ensure that your employees are in a positive frame of mind, and to consolidate ties.
Despite this lockdown, the law stipulates that companies must ensure good working conditions for their employees, by covering various expenses, such as the cost of teleworking equipment and supplies.
So, at a time when telecommuting well-being is paramount, providing your employees with a quality, ethical coffee break, wherever they may be, can also contribute to their professional performance and your company’s development…
Would you like to offer your teleworking employees a coffee break? Nothing could be simpler: enter your message in our contact form and we’ll get back to you with a tailor-made offer. Our website also features a dedicated area for professionals / companies / CSEs, enabling you to benefit from discounted prices.