Harsh Browns

Lunch club

Something I miss about the Before Times, when most people were in the office the majority of the week, is lunchtime. It had a social appeal. You could go out and spend time with your team or friends or meet up with someone new over lunch. It was easy to organise because a lot of people were in the office often. You could drop the idea sporadically, either taking your packed lunch to a park or finding a local café/restaurant/food stall to chow at.

It’s a little bit harder now, you have to be more deliberate and plan ahead, but getting lunch with other people is still a joy. When I worked in restaurants, I barely ate proper meals, let alone spent time eating food with friends or workmates.

So how might we make more time for lunch and the conviviality it brings?

Lunch Club is one idea. You pay £1 per week to join Lunch Club¹, which creates a kitty. One day per week, Lunch Club assembles to eat together, and two or three members lead on providing the food, using the funds from the kitty to pay for it. The lunch-makers have freedom to decide what people eat (as long as they follow dietary requirements and allergies of the club members), meaning they could buy picnic things or French food or West African food or vegan delicacies. Whatever takes their fancy. The lunch-eaters get to enjoy the spontaneity of not choosing what to have for lunch².

Taking the Lunch Club idea further, wouldn’t it be cool if everyone could cook together? The lunch-makers decide a menu, buy the ingredients, write up some simple recipes, and everyone makes the lunch together. This requires kitchen space, of course, but if collaboration and togetherness are values at the heart of your organisation, giving staff a kitchen space to use helps facilitate those behaviours.

But let’s be real: most offices were designed as workplaces, not culture spaces. A hybrid office could be a culture space, but many of the buildings we shuffle into once or twice a week are dry, functional places.

A concept I’d like to riff on is office hours. Set aside 90 minutes every week/fortnight to have lunch and make it an open invite. Let anyone book that slot in your calendar, choose a place together, and meet for lunch³. Then the conversation goes wherever it goes, and you get to eat at new places.

All of this could happen online, of course, through software. But something I’ve learned over the last two years is my limit for social interaction regarding work. I’ve tried fully remote and fully in-office, and I’m definitely one of those hybrid people.

While seeing other people in the flesh at work is great, I’m also after some social interaction. Lunch is a slice of time we each own, to do with whatever we please. Let’s get together?