We Asked HBR Readers to Have Lunch with Their Coworkers. Here’s What We Learned.

In 2006, I’d just taken a job with a publishing company and was asked to work out of the U.S. office for a couple of weeks. It would be my first time in the country, and I was excited to experience a new work culture. What most took me by surprise was that most people ate lunch alone at their desks. Back home in India, I was used to eating lunch (mostly homecooked) with my colleagues. It was our time to bond, vent, talk about new restaurants and travel plans, share anecdotes about the weekend, and, simply build a community and a sense of belonging. It was noisy, chaotic, and fun—a place where hierarchy seemed to disappear. We looked forward to that time every day. So, eating alone was, well, awkward and new for me. And it made me wonder: Do people who indulge in desktop dining feel as connected with their colleagues as those who share a meal with work friends? Can it really break down barriers, particularly among people at different levels in an organization? I turned to research, experts in the field—and HBR’s own readers—to find out. I learned that the act of eating together, which is called commensality, can be nuanced. It has the power to break down hierarchies, but can also reinforce them. It can make people feel included but can sometimes be othering. When done right, however, eating together at work can be a powerful tool for fostering stronger relationships and cohesion. The Lunch Project Experiment Given my experience, I wondered what would happen if people who don’t normally share a meal at the office did so more regularly. After all, food has historically played a critical role in welcoming strangers into a community. Research shows that commensality is one of the most commonly shared practices among humans, and that shared eating satisfies a need for interaction. In my experience, it strengthens social ties throughout an organization. So, I reached out to our HBR readers to volunteer to collaborate with us on a four-week experiment I named the Lunch Project. The ask was simple: If they usually ate alone at work, we wanted them to reach out to a few colleagues to have lunch together at least once a week over a period of one month. It didn’t have to be anything fancy, just their regular meal. We also asked them to answer the following questions at the end of every week: How did you feel at the end of the meal? If you were able to do more than one meal a week, how did you feel at the end of the week? Did you notice any impact on your bonding with colleagues from lunching together? Is this something you would look forward to as a ritual? I got an overwhelming number of entries, but capped the total number of participants at eight for ease of data handling. Six identified as women and two as men. Four participants were between 35-44 years, and four participants were between 45–64 years. They were spread across the globe and worked in Greece, Philippines, Germany, United Arab Emirates, the U.S, Canada, and Finland. Of course, this wasn’t a scientific study; it’s possible the people who opted in were more likely to want to eat lunch with others, among other drawbacks. But from analyzing their responses, I did find some common threads. The Benefits—and Challenges—of Shared Meals Sharing meals has the power to reinforce ties. Seventy-six percent of respondents in a UK survey said that sharing a meal was a good way to bring people closer together. In one study (led by Cornell University’s Kevin Kniffin, who I also interviewed for this project), firefighters reported that eating together made them feel like a family. Kniffin’s research showed significant positive correlations between eating together and team performance. Another study found that eating together at the workplace provides an ideal setting for meaningful conversations with colleagues. “Sharing a meal seems to have the potential to temporarily relax some of the hierarchical relationships that people otherwise might have through their work connections,” Kniffin told me. Responses from the Lunch Project reinforced these findings. Some participants reported feeling “inspired” and that “the burst of energy that stayed with them well after the meal was over.” One person reported that the lunch wasn’t just about nourishment and that “it unwittingly became a moment to toss around fresh ideas, solve problems in impromptu ways, and talk about things like sustainability, digital shifts, and where technology might be headed next.” Another said that they wondered why they hadn’t done this sooner. Participants also seemed to have fostered stronger relationships with colleagues over the course of the experiment. One noted that while they initially felt a little awkward, especially with trying to make small talk to break the ice, eventually, as they shared food and personal news and talked in a friendly way, the group got more relaxed with each other. Another mentioned that during the first meal they wished “time would just pass quickly,” but over the weeks, the frequent interactions made them more comfortable with each other. A third participant reported that “sitting down together in an informal setting really loosened them up and stirred their connections.” Yet another felt that at the end of the experiment there was “greater openness and deeper trust that wasn’t there before” and that they were even thinking of inviting a few colleagues from other departments to lunch with them. They even noted that the “lunches turned out to be a catalyst for creative chats and knitted the team closer.” In contrast, one participant mentioned that while she had a good talk with their colleague and was happy to have gotten to know the colleague better, she wondered if a not-so-great conversation could actually leave people feeling drained, and if one’s experience of the meal was dependent on who their lunch partner was. This likely has some truth to it. “While commensality literally means coming together at the table, whether this is experienced as a good thing very much depends on who is brought together and what rules govern the practice,” said Harry G. West, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Exeter. Workplace and country culture impacts shared eating. Our contemporary work cultures make shared eating practices somewhat difficult. “Market economies value productivity above all else. Where ‘time is money,’ taking time out to eat with one another is brought into tension with workplace imperatives,” West explained to me. I observed similar patterns in some of the responses I received. One participant reported, “I couldn’t have any virtual or in person lunches with a colleague last week. It was hectic and when I was in the office, I ate a pizza…while working in my office with the door closed.” Another said, “We did only one meal per week because of workload,” and added that she might need to “schedule it on the calendar.” Whether or not people eat with others at work can vary based on company and industry norms as well. “The differences often depend on workplace culture (is lunch seen as a legitimate break or as time lost?), working-time arrangements (is a lunch break factored in?), job status (do you have the flexibility or means to leave your desk?), and institutional and cultural frameworks,” explained Martin Bruegel, a historian with France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment. For example, in workplaces where people eat in shifts, such as a hotel, restaurant, or manufacturing plant, or where eating together is deeply integrated in the system (firehouses or military), commensality is more organic. In contrast, workplaces that encourage back-to-back meetings, or those with a focus on high performance or financial success (such as sales or consulting) can cause employees to have a lower preference for daytime commensality because they use lunchtime for other tasks. For example, a survey found that 22% of employees in the U.S. work through mealtimes because they fear there isn’t enough time to finish their work and 20% say they just have too many meetings to take a break. Culture is another factor. In Spain, for example, a lunch break (or siesta) used to sometimes be as long as two to three hours, and many people even went home to eat with their families or take a nap. France even had a law banning people from eating at their desks. (It was amended during the height of the pandemic.) In contrast, 28% of British workers eat in their workspace and 44% eat lunch alone, which are the highest rates in Europe. These numbers are even higher in the U.S., with 62% of American workers saying the same. Shared eating can feel exclusionary for some. “The way we dine has historically been shaped in part by social hierarchies, from royalty and courtiers to parents and children,” West told me. So, I wondered if, contrary to my experience of lunch time in India, shared eating at the workplace could feel othering. “Some may struggle to find their place, or to perform as expected—be they ethnic outsiders, of a different social class or caste, or neurodivergent, to give just a few examples,” West said. Bruegel agreed, adding, “Eating together draws lines as much as it builds a group/community. Age, migrant backgrounds, or unfamiliarity with dominant food norms and table manners can also foster discomfort and social distance.” We heard this from our Lunch Project participants as well. One noted, “Sometimes the meal was relaxed and good; other times it left me worried. What made the difference was how close or how far were the people, from a hierarchy perspective, from me.” I asked Kniffin if leaders could help minimize the risk, or if enforced sociality could feel coercive. “When company leaders authorize (or don’t authorize) physical spaces for coworkers eating and drinking on-site, that is certainly one big way in which leadership sets (or doesn’t set) the tone. With or without dedicated space, if an organization sponsors some fraction of meals (with managers participating), it seems like most employees would appreciate that kind of sponsorship if managers were supportive,” Kniffin said. He further added that if those meals were to happen with decent frequency, and without taking up too much time, they would likely seem less like an event and more like a routine or habit. Commensality can feel like a time-consuming ritual. The development of a routine or habit was a challenge for some participants in the Lunch Project. For example, a person who works on a global team said that coordinating schedules to have a meal with colleagues was not as easy as they thought. Another person mentioned that they would like to continue but would need to “intentionally plan” group meals, while another said they may need to consider “scheduling it” on their calendar to continue doing it. Despite these challenges, none of the participants said that they would discontinue the ritual. I asked Michael I. Norton, a Harvard Business School professor and author of The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions why people may have found this part of the project hard. “When people think of the word ‘ritual,’ they tend to imagine something elaborate and time-consuming, likely due to the connection to religious services,” he noted, adding that in fact, what people get wrong is that very meaningful rituals can be very brief. “One couple that my research team and I interviewed about their romantic rituals told us that they simply clink their silverware together each time that they have a meal,” Norton added. He gave me another good analogy: meditation. “While it would be great if we all had an extra hour to devote each day to this practice, the reality is that we often don’t even have an extra minute. Instead, we often see people taking a quick moment with their morning coffee or tea, to be calm and reflective, before facing their day.” So, I asked Norton how to ensure that getting together with coworkers doesn’t feel like a time-consuming burden. “More important than making this happen exactly at lunchtime is finding 10 minutes somewhere during the day to come together.” I wondered why I never thought of it like that, particularly back in 2006. Maybe instead of expecting my American colleagues to take out those 30 minutes for lunch, I could’ve just asked them to meet for 10 minutes for a short coffee break instead. So, as the Lunch Project draws to a close, here’s my recommendation: Begin with coffee or chai (or croissant or bagel) catch-ups. Build up that time when feasible. These informal gatherings can help foster more positive and supportive work relationships and help you get to know your colleagues as people, beyond their job roles. And who knows, you might even make friends for life.

We Asked HBR Readers to Have Lunch with Their Coworkers. Here’s What We Learned.

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