The office coffee is more important than it seems

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Nathan Hartland was at Caribou Coffee in downtown Baltimore recently, picking up a cappuccino on his lunch hour. His 3-year-old son had awoken in the middle of the previous night, leaving a sleep-deprived Hartland in need of a serious jolt of caffeine.

“I’m here to make sure I’m awake through the afternoon,” said Hartland, a lawyer at Miles & Stockbridge. He could have had a cup of free coffee at the office, but opted not to.

“I don’t enjoy it — and it also gives me a headache,” said Hartland, who prefers cappuccino because it doesn’t leave his head throbbing like regular or decaf coffee.

Clearly, people have strong preferences when it comes to their java, which can complicate things for employers who offer coffee in the workplace.

We usually don’t think much about that cup of Joe — other than whether to opt for skim milk or cream; sugar or Equal. But workplace experts say that depending on how it is handled, coffee can either be a perk that fuels employee morale or an annoyance that steams up workers to the point where they feel alienated and disgruntled.

Think of the person who consistently gets stuck having to brew a fresh pot because a sneaky co-worker always makes off with the last cupful. Or the decaf drinker who feels left out in an office that offers only regular coffee.

“Variety is very important,” said Deborah Diehl, a partner at law firm Whiteford, Taylor & Preston, which offers several different coffees. “There are certain attorneys who, if the French roast is out, are not going to have a good day.”

Some workers are so dedicated to their favorite brand of coffee, they’d rather dig into their pocket to buy their own coffee than settle for what’s available at the office for free.

On a recent weekday, Cory Stokesberry was heading back to the downtown construction company where he works as a project manager, a Starbucks coffee in hand.

Stokesberry moved to Baltimore from Seattle — the home of Starbucks — five months ago. Coming from the Emerald City, a place where the aroma of coffee pervades the air and there are downtown streets with a coffee shop on every corner, Stokesberry was overjoyed when he finally found a Starbucks in downtown Baltimore.

“It’s not even comparable,” he said of the comparison between Starbucks and his office’s coffee.

Joyce Russell, an industrial and organizational psychologist who consults for private companies and government agencies, said what seems like a trivial matter — such as who cleans the office coffee pot — can loom large these days because workers at many companies may already be feeling frazzled from being overworked.

“If there’s already a collaborative environment, this won’t be much of a stresser,” said Russell, who teaches courses in leadership and organizational behavior at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “But if people are already feeling stressed, this won’t help.”

Workers tend to view how a company handles the little perks as a symbol of how much they care about their employees, said Filiz Tabak, a professor of management and leadership at Towson University’s College of Business and Economics.

If handled correctly, free coffee and other small benefits can turn into an advantage because it makes workers feel better about their company, reducing employee turnover and making it easier to recruit new workers.

“If I’m in a company where my well-being counts, I’m going to talk about it to my friends and their friends,” Tabak said.

So employers should think twice before deciding arbitrarily to save money by switching to a less expensive brand of coffee or eliminating it altogether, said Russell, the organizational psychologist. If a change needs to be made, workers should be included in the decision-making process, she said.

That’s what Whiteford, Taylor & Preston did when it decided to switch coffee vendors several years ago.

The firm set up an array of coffees from different suppliers in a conference room and let workers have their say about which they liked best. That made workers feel appreciated, said Tracy Canady, a collections specialist who favors French vanilla.

To handle the decaf versus regular conundrum, when the firm redid its downtown Baltimore offices about three years ago, it went from communal coffee pots, one for decaf and one for regular, to single-serve Flavia coffee machines on its employee floors.

Instead of using a coffee pot, the Flavia machines use single-serve coffee packets that are inserted into the machine to make individual cups of coffee.

That means workers get the variety they want without having a coffee pot to clean.

On a recent Wednesday, the offerings included hot chocolate and seven types of coffee ranging from cappuccino latte swirl to house blend decaf.

Coffee is an important part of the social fabric, in the office and elsewhere.

“If you’re talking to clients, it’s the first thing you offer them,” said Alexander Koff, who heads Whiteford, Taylor & Preston’s global practice.

Corby Kummer, a senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly and the author of book “The Joy of Coffee,” is generally no fan of office coffee, however. It tends to be too weak, or too bitter, because it has been left on the burner too long, he said.

“So often you get something that reminds you of what Abraham Lincoln told a waiter,” Kummer said. “ ‘If this is coffee, bring me tea, and if this is tea, bring me coffee.’ ”

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