The benefits of eating together

Ok. This title is probably one of the oldest sayings in the book. Maybe not as old as love thy neighbour, kiss his wife, etc. But it's close.

Eating together with somebody fosters some kinship. Growing up, when dad was waiting for you to join him at the dinner table, it was such a bother. It would stop your already hour-long phone conversation, you were not done reading that comic/novel, etc. etc.

I didn't realize its importance till I was 36.

It happened at Sidestep - a company I worked for, for 4 years. The first year or so, a couple of us would catch lunch more or less regularly. Then some of the women ( it's always them, isn't it?) started making lunches more social. They'd make it a point of inviting all of the development team (which was less than 10, btw).

Initially, though it was a little bit of a bother, it became a regular thing. Atleast 3-4 times a week 5-6 of us ended up eating together. And we started talking a lot.

We mostly had good fun. We had plenty of fodder:

• our single guys' relationship woes
• a mother a little too controlling with her 1 year old
• another way too hippie like
• our kids eating vaseline, pouring mud on their faces..
• a newly married, meat-loving guy with a vegetarian wife..
• politics
• etc. etc.

Most of the time, that extended lunch time beyond 30 min. Sometimes beyond an hour.

"Bad for workplace productivity", you'd say?

Wrong.

"Oh, at lunch you'd talk about work stuff - algorithms, design, things to do etc.? "

Well.. mostly not.

"You stayed back late, and made up for the lost time? "

No. We did stay late regularly, but it wasn't because of the lunch stuff.

"You say, productivity didn't suffer?"

No. It got better.

"WHAT ? "

We understood each other better.

We stepped on each other's toes much lesser.

In meetings, when we took opposite positions on a technical issue, it never got us worked up -Never so bad that we took/pushed for wrong decisions to satisfy our egos.

A level of trust, friendliness, and camaraderie was built that

• Nobody shirked their share of work and put undue load on their peers
• If we had problems with somebody's work, we didn't need to tiptoe around their egos -Direct discussions happened, and things got resolved.
• Even when engineers got overruled by the smart-ass architects, there were no lingering hard feelings( I think)
• When the company looked shaky at times- morale within engineering was still fine. We all liked working there -with each other.
• We did joint coding/debugging routinely

I could go on. The converse also was true. The most problems we had were with people we didn't eat together with - going by memories of product managers we ate with, vs. didn't.

Which brings me to my Jerry Springer moment at the end:

Management should subtly encourage people to eat with the people they work with. Even the folks that people interface rarely - take time out once or twice a week and go eat with them.

You don't need to talk about work.

But your work & working relationships will get better.