Wellness Amenities Have a Healthy Future for Office Buildings

When offices around the world began closing back in the early days of the pandemic, we had little idea how radically COVID-19 would reshape workplace culture. 

The trend toward “healthy buildings” and wellness amenities was already well under way pre-pandemic. Frameworks like WELL and Fitwel have been established to certify a building meets standards for air quality, access to daylight, and other factors that can reduce attrition and sick days while increasing ROI. 

Wellness, however, means something very different now. It’s no longer just about perks like on-site yoga or a juice bar. Wellness now encompasses safety and security measures, including contactless technology.

Property managers and office landlords are boosting spend on solutions to ensure tenants’ safety and to lure them back to buildings. These changes encompass upgrading HVAC systems, installing thermal cameras to screen body temperatures, investing in software to manage building capacity, hiring staff to monitor the maximum number of people riding in elevators, and even adding on-site doctors and lab testing for the coronavirus as part of landlord amenity packages.

Food and Safety in the Workplace

In addition to structural and procedural changes, contactless technology has emerged as one of the readily accessible steps a building can take—and one that tenants want. Elevators and office doors can be opened by a motion sensor or facial recognition, and employees can order coffee or reserve a conference room via smartphones.

Pre-pandemic work routines will certainly change when employees return to offices, but lunch breaks and online food ordering will still happen—it might just look a little different.

Prepare to say goodbye to food delivery workers freely entering and exiting a building, meeting couriers in the lobby, or having them sign in at a front desk and riding elevators up to offices. Managing foot traffic and maintaining social distancing is now a must.

Minnow conducted a survey in May 2020 to see how COVID-19 has changed attitudes around workplace food delivery and found that roughly three-fourths of employees plan to order lunch from a restaurant or food cart when they return to the office with the same frequency as they did before the pandemic.

And notably, 94.1% said having a contact-free method of picking up food delivered to their workplace was important. Makeshift solutions like dropping off orders at a reception desk or putting them on a communal table in the lobby have become risky propositions.

That’s where Minnow comes in. Our touchless, contact-free Pickup Pods take the worry out of food delivery by helping keep food secure and people safe.

In addition to eliminating face-to-face interactions between tenants and food delivery workers, Minnow Pickup Pods can also reduce demands on building staff by freeing up their time to focus on more valuable tasks, as well as helping to increase tenant satisfaction.

Creating a space where tenants feel safe and secure isn’t just a superficial gesture, it’s good business. Tenants who don’t feel confident about safely returning to a building, might vacate instead, affecting the bottom line.