The Future of Work Is Lunch

Do you remember lunch?

The meal was no longer important. The weekday lunch break has been a casualty of the shift to remote work since the beginning of the Pandemic. Across office parks and downtowns around the world, the great feedlots of salaried workers were empty.

The workday lunch has been seen as a waste of time and money in America. It ate away at company time, interrupted the flow of work, taxed the wallet of employees and heaped on unnecessary calories, leading to weight gain. More than half of US professionals ate lunch alone, and more than a third never took a lunch break before. Lunch was an outdated decadence, as Gordon Gekko put it, for most people.

Well, you know what to do for wimps. Sitting at home in your sweatpants, laptop propped up on the kitchen counter, eating questionable hummus on crackers, as a zoom call drones on in the background, is the kind of life you can only dream of.

It's time to eat. Office workers going back to work. Home workers want to go outside. Millions of people stuck in hybrid experiments need something to sustain them as they try to figure out what the future of work looks like.

What is the reason for lunch? Breakfast meetings require the readjustment of delicately balanced morning routines: wake-ups, carpoolings and drop-offs. Dinner is too long and expensive. Lunch is very democratic and can be changed quickly. Lunch delivers the goods whether it is a dozen ironworkers eating sandwiches on a steel beam or two CEOs breaking bread in a private dining room. It can be a brown bag and a walk in the park.

Most of us spend our days sitting in place. The monotony of our bodies needs to be broken. Workers who took a proper lunch for a year showed increased energy when they came back from work in the afternoon.

Our imaginations are free to wander and we can connect disparate ideas that may have been stuck all morning in the rut of work tasks. According to a study in the Academy of Management Journal, when we step out for lunch, we might be able to spark creativity.

We look at things on the way to get the meal and then we look at the world after we eat it. Valuable information can be found in that information. The deeper understanding you acquire about the world by moving through it every day is what is called embodied cognitive. An ad on the way to the elevator can lead to a new idea, even if it's just an ad.

When we were in the school cafeteria, we learned that lunch is just a place for talking. The rich analog kind that happens when people sit face-to-face over food is not the scheduled, deliberate, capital-C conversations we have on Zoom. Between bites of egg salad and ramen slurps, these conversations vacillate between personal and professional topics. The most significant ideas often start with a casual observation that takes root and expands over time into something bigger.

It is difficult to build online or through work alone, but lunch meetings can forge long-term trust and understanding. Sharing a meal can inject a social element into formal relationships without being officially social. people let their guard down They open up, even briefly, and share their thoughts more freely than they would back at the office or on the phone.

The bottom line can be influenced by all this. An associate professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College conducted an experiment a decade ago. She had two groups of students negotiate a joint venture in two different places. The lunchers made more money than the hungry ones. Don't do business on empty stomachs.

Maybe companies and individuals should think about the space in the middle of the day, when the energy is at its lowest, as they plan for a post- Covid future. Lunch may be the future of work.

That hour needs to be carved out. Take a sail into the open waters and look for something to eat. Put your phone down if you are with other people. Joke about something. There are stories to be told. Have something to eat. Take the time to savor it. If you do it right, lunch could be the best part of your job.

It is possible that we can do it. It is time to do lunch.

Two blocks from New York headquarters, the article was conceived at Land of Plenty restaurant.