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According to research, businesses who are providing their staff with free fruit at work are helping to boost their employees’ productivity, energy and wellbeing.

A UK fruit delivery company worked with a large UK business to conduct a workplace trial in order to measure the impact fresh fruit has on the lives of office workers. During the trial, 216 baskets were delivered, containing seven varieties of fruit.

Over 75% of the 320 people who took part in the research said the free fruit made them feel more valued, combined with 80% of staff feeling it had improved their fruit intake. These are pretty heavy hitting statistics and some people may question such high numbers. However, whether these numbers are accurate or it was a placebo response, doesn’t change the fact that workers felt happier and felt more valued. And happy people are more likely to be healthy people. And healthy people don’t take lots of sick days.

From here, things just continued to snowball for the better. Now their staff were eating more fruit, which in turn reduced their intake of sugary or fatty snacks, which in turn helped towards their general health. Closer to home, we know of New Zealand companies who have replaced their chocolatey snack boxes with fruit boxes and nobody once complained, in fact some staff showed great relief!

Getting work-life balance “out of whack” is considerably easier to do than it used to be. Over committing ourselves and with technology now making us always “available” provides a better chance of upsizing our food and downsizing our exercise. So companies who take the initiative with fruit boxes may be seen as more caring to their employees.

Have you ever wondered what the criteria for the “Best Workplaces Survey and Awards” is, held every year in New Zealand? It basically involves a survey where employees grade their workplace and employers across categories including leadership, culture, recognition and engagement. Last year 228 companies and over 32,000 employees had their say.

This information is then passed onto the company’s leaders with key insights identifying the characteristics that make their workplace great places to work, as well as areas where they can improve to increase engagement levels.

Companies involved are broken down into size, so small local businesses are not competing with giant corporations. We are noticing more and more of our customers are involved in the awards. These companies invest resource to be a great place to work and we hope in some way our fruit boxes ‘add’ to their significant efforts. Such initiatives go a long way to saying “We care beyond the bottom line” and makes going to work something worth getting up for.