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5 Ways To Incorporate Water Into Your Coworking Office Floor Plan

The COVID-19 pandemic changed how people live and interact with the environment. Face masks became a norm, along with carrying around personal hand sanitizers and disposable gloves. The measures implemented by the government and health organizations to curb the spread of the virus heightened awareness around hygiene, which also impacted our views on traditional water coolers, water fountains, and bottle filling stations. The importance of commercial water filtration is higher than ever. Water fountaining and filling stations serve to provide access to safe drinking water, thus offering an alternative to coffee and carbonated drinks whilst accommodating a wide array of users, including your employees and clients.

As the work environment rapidly evolves to hybrid models, coworking office floor plans are being adopted across all industries to allow organizations to access all the aspects of the modern office without self-creating it.1 Successful coworking spaces offer members a unique blend of flexible space, coworking amenities, and a networking community. A lot goes into the design of a great coworking offering, and all of it is important. Incorporating water into the shared office plan entails assessing the layout of the space and placing water at convenient and central locations not too far from the working stations. Organizations and small businesses have various options to incorporate hydration in coworking office floor plans.

Options to Incorporate Water into Your Coworking Office

1. Install a Touchless Water Refill Station

As the number of remote workers during the pandemic grew from 31% to 62%, 41% of employees hoped to return to the office in the same capacity as before the pandemic.2 The CDC recommended that office building employers, building owners, managers, and building operations specialists replace high-touch communal items with touchless solutions.3

As businesses continue to bring employees back to the office, now is the time to adopt new working spaces that promote productivity and safety. Ultimately the aim of reinventing these spaces is to create a safe environment where people enjoy their work, foster peer-driven collaboration with colleagues from different departments and achieve the objectives of their organizations. There is no need for offices to bring back the traditional office space that features expensive and plastic waste associated with single-use water bottles while trying to encourage hydration in the shared office space.

Touchless water refill stations have been incorporated into coworking spaces. Some of the organizations, including Google, have water refill stations where employees refill their water bottles to stay hydrated throughout the day. Refilling stations provide excellent quality water that filters out any particles in the waterway. FloWater provides Touchless Water Dispensers with advanced technology features, including;

• Advanced Osmosis water purification and sanitization. Osmosis 7-stage water purification technology with filtration pores of approximately 0.0001 microns in size, much smaller than viruses and bacteria. The process removes up to 99% of all toxins and contaminants in water, including viruses, bacteria, and heavy metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, chemicals, and microplastics.

• Ozone-generating devices that disperse consistently throughout the day. Ozone is one of the most potent and technologically advanced sanitization mechanisms available and is destructive to bacteria and viruses. The process also alkalizes and oxygenates the water and adds electrolytes for better hydration.

• A large fill area with a fully recessed dispensing nozzle with no bottle contact, eliminating potential cross-contamination from bottle to bottle.

• Touchless activation pedals or soft-touch buttons that are flat and can be easily cleaned and wiped free of contaminants with disinfecting wipes.

• They are designed for refillable usage only as opposed to combined bottle-filler and drinking fountain stations.

2. Incorporate Touchless Water Coolers

Water coolers and dispensers remain the most used appliances in offices. With modern touch-free water dispensers, establishments can share spaces without sharing germs. These dispensers provide clean, purified water without the possibility of cross-contamination. Designed to fit both small and large water bottles, it is easy to keep a reusable water bottle refilled throughout the day. Since the traditional water coolers and fountains are not making their way back to the modern office, a filtered water dispenser utilizing medical-grade filtration technology with stainless steel provides virus and bacteria-free water for drinking.

FloWater’s bottle-free water coolers provide reliable, cost-effective, and eco-friendly drinking water from your building’s water source, eliminating the need for water delivery. No longer are you required to escort delivery people in and out of your building or have cleaning schedules for water jugs, or look for storage space in the newly configured office spaces. Touch-free coolers offer the flexibility to incorporate water into your office floor space.

With the touchless technology, you will hover your finger over the sensors on the machine, and the right sensor will dispense water. These machines are sleek and clean with safe dispensing technology that offers leak protection. In addition, they come with Position Sensitive Detector (PSD) sensors that offer users reliable touchless dispensing without the concern of possible false dispensing from light reflections, radio waves, and static electricity. 

It’s a good idea to have multiple water coolers in shared spaces, like one in the conference room and one by the office furniture in the lounge. If you have a dedicated desk, you might be able to afford the luxury of having one in your own private office space, but make sure that everyone else’s water needs have been met beforehand.

3. Have a Hydration Policy

Hydration is essential for improved productivity among your employees. Research shows that workers who rely on thirst to determine personal fluid levels only replace half of the fluid they lose through sweat. Conversely, workers who engage in a hydrating program maintain the optimal hydration levels and do not suffer dehydration. If your employees wait until they get thirsty to drink water, they will be trying to bridge a gap of between 1 and 2l fluid deficit. Drinking such large volumes of water at a go is difficult and oftentimes leads to problems such as nausea, vomiting, and headaches. The human body has a 1.5L fluid absorption rate; hence the body will not absorb higher volumes at a go. With program drinking, workers focus on drinking small amounts of water frequently over short intervals.

In a shared workspace, employees might get highly engaged and will only meet their hydration needs when they feel thirsty. Implementing a hydration policy in these kinds of office design layouts ensures that employees get the required hydration to keep them productive throughout the day. Legislative bodies such as OSHA have recommendations for the hydration requirements for workers. Furthermore, you can foster a habit of employee hydration through education and challenge events. With a coworking community, you can track progress and reward milestones with branded merchandise, including branded water bottles with your company logo.

4. Capitalize on Faucet Tap Filters

Seeing the permanent changes driven by the coronavirus pandemic in how consumers get safe drinking water, small businesses utilizing shared workspace environments need to address the issue of water access to their staff. Now more than ever, people do not trust the quality of tap water for fear of contamination. Moreover, consumers no longer love the taste of tap water, yet they do not want the inconveniences, expense, and plastic waste that comes with stockpiling plastic water bottles.

The FloWater Faucet Filter has a five-stage Micro Carbon Block water filter that reduces metals including lead, mercury, and arsenic to undetectable levels as well as lowers fluoride to a safe PPM concentration. Once the filter is installed, it is incredibly easy to transition between tap water and FloWater supply at any time, which means you can transform tap water into safe drinking water. Additional features you will get from the FloWater faucet filter include a 100% satisfaction guarantee. You can try the faucets within 14 days, and if you do not love them, you will get a full refund for your purchase. The starter pack comes with one faucet mount, one water filter, which provides twice the flow as compared to typical filters, and two installation adaptors for easy installation. It is advisable to replace the filters every three months.

5. Traditional Drinking-Water Fountains

Drinking water fountains provide easy access to water in your coworking office spaces. Incorporating a drinking fountain for your employees and customers ensures free hydration to thousands of people and helps keep plastic bottles out of landfills and fresh waterways. However, it is important to keep in mind that although traditional drinking fountains have been the norm for decades, it doesn’t mean they are providing the cleanest form of drinking water.

Provide Easy Access to Safe and Clean Drinking Water

FloWater solutions are designed to meet or exceed the needs and specifications of education, healthcare, retail, and modern office setups. At FloWater, our products are engineered with advanced touchless and water filtration technology to comply with ADA standards as well as provide safe drinking water. As you embrace the new work models, ensure that your coworking office layout plans provide access to clean, safe drinking water without the environmentally destructive effects of single-use plastic water bottles. Contact us today to get the best touchless water solution in your office. 

Sources: 

  1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2020/10/06/the-disruption-era-the-future-of-coworking/
  2. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/pulse-survey/future-of-work.html
  3. https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/cdc-at-work.html