Taking a mid-morning break can be an opportunity to recharge your batteries and interact with your colleagues. With the mid-morning coffee great ideas emerge, some will say. Others consider it a waste of time. We look for the best from each side.
Coffee has positive effects on the human body. Drinking 2 cups of coffee a day increases alertness and reactivity, and prevents some diseases.
But the mid-morning coffee break goes beyond the benefits of the substance. With the exception of companies that allow teleworking, and although its practice has declined with the return to the office due to health restrictions, it serves to:
- Communicating with colleagues and improving the working environment.
- Encouraging spontaneity and creativity
- To help restore vitality.
- It is an oasis of relaxation in the middle of a stressful day.
But also...
- It interrupts your concentration on what you were doing.
- If you have flexible working hours, you can extend your working day.
Which position do you identify more with, the advocates or the opponents of mid-morning coffee?
- The coffee break increases productivity by 8% according to a study by the prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). An experiment revealed that performance increased due to the break and the communicative exercise with other workers.
They are not alone in arguing that this sociability of mid-morning coffee fosters creativity and human relationships:
- In 2010, a team from the Faculty of Psychology at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) claimed that the opportunity to take a break during the working day helps to improve vitality and that problems at work do not affect family life as much.
- In 2008, researcher Pernille Stroebaek (University of Copenhagen) interviewed 20 Danish civil servants and concluded that the mid-morning break fulfils important psychological and social functions in the workplace. It was seen as “an informal and spontaneous moment to release tensions, discuss complicated cases with colleagues and vent emotional tensions arising from stress and crisis situations they were forced to deal with”.
Anti-coffee break league: Harvard Business Review
- As published Harvard Business Review in 2012, taking short breaks throughout the day does not revitalise you, unless you are doing something work-related or positive, such as praising a colleague or learning something new.
The author of this research, Charlotte Fritz, argues that micro-breaks that are not work-related (such as making a phone call or checking Facebook) are not associated with more energy and less fatigue, and are sometimes even associated with increased tiredness. Her idea is that when you are in the middle of work, you do better and feel better if you focus on your work. Fritz is an advocate of longer breaks, such as lunch breaks.
Another argument:
- Eliminating or reducing the coffee break is one of the formulas in those companies that are committed to combating presenteeism by shortening dead time at work, such as the coffee break or long lunches, to allow the working day to be more intensive and employees to leave earlier without preventing them from doing so. improving productivity.
The best thing to do? Be flexible and adapt your habits to the needs of your job and your way of being more productive, even taking advantage of the mid-morning coffee break. Find your own formula!
