10 ways to keep your employees happy in 2023
Swap Al Desko Dining for a Communal Table
In 2014, Oxford Dictionary added the phrase “al desko”. This makes eating at your desk sound rather more fancy than the reality of scarfing down a sandwich whilst responding to emails and attempting to chip away at tasks. Not only is this shown to be unproductive, it makes a rather miserable experience of eating itself. It can also lead to mindless, rushed eating and even poor digestion as a result of stress.
Firstly, eating with other people increases social bonding and feelings of wellbeing. These can have positive knock-on effects for your business too. Provide a communal dining table to encourage people to step away from their desks and eat socially. Remove visual reminders of work or technology. Set the scene for an enjoyable meal experience with simple touches like fresh flowers, jugs of fruit infused water, and tea and coffee nearby. Social Pantry’s chefs ensure delicious, inspiring food for your team. Plus our creative and styling experts are on hand to help you create the perfect dining environment.
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
If you’re a company that prides itself on prioritising employee wellbeing, promoting strong team culture, providing high quality and caring about sustainability, make sure this is reflected in your catering offering too. Crucially, how you feed your employees says a lot about how you value your employees. Providing fresh, healthy, high quality food communicates these values from inside-out. Team eating might take place away from client eyes, but integrity is what you do when no-one is watching. It can also make a huge difference to the overall sustainability and reputation of your workplace. Social Pantry guarantees this by serving exclusively fresh, seasonal, locally and sustainably sourced food. We run a zero-waste kitchen and ensuring our internal operations are as sustainable as can be. What we do behind closed doors provides a platform for your own sustainability mission.
Democratic Dining
Give employees a say on what they want to see on the menu, or how they’d like meals and snacks to be structured throughout the day. Choice and autonomy over what and how we eat greatly impacts our sense of wellbeing and control of our lives. Therefore it’s an easy way to help your employees feel empowered at work. Having employees vote on a team treat meal upon reaching certain milestones can be a great incentive too!
Be Inclusive
Catering for all dietary requirements is an important part of making your workplace inclusive and accessible. Additionally, it ensures people feel valued and included, as well as ensuring they get a good meal to fuel productive, enjoyable work. At Social Pantry, we design menus for specific dietary requirements based on what to include and get creative with. We don’t begin with what to remove or avoid. Moreover we’re proud to offer innovative and imaginative entirely plant-based menus for events and the workplace, as well as the flexibility to adapt dishes and provide alternatives. All our food is freshly prepared by hand and packed and delivered direct to you. This ensures we know exactly what goes into every dish and can provide full transparency.
Support, Don’t Sabotage, Eating Well
We can’t say we’re totally on board with what the head of a food watchdog recently had to say about bringing cake into the office! However we do believe in the value of creating a food environment that supports healthy habits. Providing regular, nutritious, exciting meals and snacks that employees look forward to and provide long-lasting energy and satisfaction helps to reduce mindless grazing. Social Pantry’s fresh, seasonal, vibrant produce-led food is naturally rich in colourful fruits and veg. It’s full of high-quality protein, wholegrains, nuts and seeds, making it easy for employees to eat well. Plus we can also provide nutrient-packed snacks, healthy grab-and-go options and keep your pantry topped up with the good stuff to encourage healthy habits.
Habit Stacking (or Snacking!)
Make enjoyable occasions of routine workplace events with specific food and drink rituals for your team to look forward to. Provide fresh fruit smoothies and a build-your-own bagel bar at the Monday morning planning session. Celebrate publication deadlines with ‘Team Tacos and Tequila’. Even less enjoyable tasks can be made more appealing by stacking delicious food and drink onto it. Freshly baked cookies and perfectly poured coffee from Social Pantry’s own Social Espresso mobile baristas go a long way on those big admin days!
Hydration Stations
We all know that staying hydrated is proven to enhance mood and productivity. However drinking enough is all too easy to forget about when we’re busy or in deep flow. Plain water isn’t always the most appealing thing to drink. Help employees stay hydrated by offering a range of tasty, refreshing drink options. For example, naturally flavoured fruit-infused water, herbal teas, iced teas, low-sugar cordials. At Social Pantry, we recently greened up our drinks offering by waving goodbye to some of the mega drinks brands contributing to plastic pollution and other environmental or ethical issues. We’ve replaced them with smaller, UK-based businesses such as Cawston Press, Belvoir Farm, and Dalston’s because they are plastic-free and share our values. You can read more about that here.
Abundance Mindset
“Abundance mindset” is one of the hottest concepts in positive psychology right now. It is associated with a host of psychological benefits. These include greater psychological security, ambition, optimism, growth, creativity, forward-thinking and focus. Foster an abundance mindset around food by providing generous rather than scarce catering with plenty of variety and choice, whilst also having a plan for anything leftover. Years of experience inform what, and how much we make, and a circular, zero-waste ethos ensures we can repurpose, refresh, or redistribute any excess! In short, Social Pantry has this down to a t.
Food That Goes Further
Know that feeling when you’re eating something delicious and just wish you could save some for later? Avoid food waste and help your employees navigate busy lives and rising cost of living by allowing employees to do just that. Carve out a time after everyone has eaten to invite people to take home any leftover catering in their own Tupperware. Sort out dinner for tonight and help with feeding the family. This makes a huge difference when time or resources are limited. Plus it’s a generous act! Give your employees that lovely feeling of being sent home with a doggy bag of food to enjoy later. As a result, Social Pantry will provide guidance and inspiration on how employees can reinvent leftovers, making them go further or turning them into an entirely new and delicious meal.
You Can Do Better Than A Supermarket Birthday Cake
Create a calendar of office birthdays and significant dates to share with your catering planner at Social Pantry. Allow us to indulge you with a proper handmade cake and bottle of Prosecco to avoid that last-minute dash to the supermarket to grab whatever is available. Accordingly, Social Pantry has talented bakers and pastry-chefs in house as well as an exclusive black-book of contacts giving us access some of London’s most sought-after celebration cake makers. We recently organised a showstopper celebration cake for a big birthday at one of our clients, Rapha, and based on the overwhelmingly grateful response, we think it’s fair to say we’ve set a precedent for a new workplace tradition!
