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The coffee break
The coffee break










It is office rituals, not HR requirements that form the basis of workplace cultures. It shows that the continued well-being of employees was not dependent on the break being scheduled what mattered was that management permitted the spontaneous action that took its place. The coffee breaks in the Danish study began instinctively as a response to a management decision to abolish official 15-minute coffee breaks each morning. It is as important to talk about the good scores in Friday as it is to talk about the bad ones. When it comes to improving happiness at work, figuring out what we need to protect as well as what we need to create requires a different approach. In fact, it feels reassuringly ordinary: an activity that everyone can take part in, regardless of whether they are having a particularly good or bad week at work. Similarly, having a coffee with a colleague doesn’t feel as desperate as a formal one-to-one meeting to discuss stress management. Fleeting niceties can pave the way for more in-depth discussions. But they are also spaces people can enter and leave with ease. Corridors often feature on the office social scene because they are narrow enough to encourage people to say hello. There are all sorts of reasons why rituals take hold. Rituals are actions or behaviours that catch on because they are followed by others.

the coffee break the coffee break

These “coping communities” strengthened how workers made sense of their cases and improved their coping patterns. They helped employees to manage stress and emotional pressure by providing an avenue for people to share their perspectives, to vent their frustrations, and to support one another. A recent study looking at the value of coffee-breaks among busy Danish workers dealing with heavy caseloads related to public family law, found they helped staff re-charge. As a result, few people look up beyond the parapet of minimum standards.īut why do we complicate things? These formal mechanisms often overlook the happiness to be found in the informal routines of employees, which usually arise spontaneously. Compliance is neither particularly fun nor inspiring.












The coffee break