Be honest: how often did you skip lunch this week? In our ever-changing work world, it can feel challenging to keep your team engaged, happy, and even fed if they’re falling into the “working through lunch” trap. While there’s multiple solutions for revamping company culture and employee happiness, nothing brings people together quite like food. That’s where lunch and learn sessions come in.
Lunch and learn sessions offer the benefit of creating space for employees to learn and connect. They feed three birds with one stone: encouraging employee engagement, keeping your team fed and happy, and increasing connection.
Lately, it seems like everyone is busier than ever at work. Investing in intentional time when coworkers come together and learn with (and from) each other is a great way to rally camaraderie, all while gathered around meals from your favorite local restaurants.
In fact, providing opportunities to develop, learn, and grow is a key driver when it comes to employee engagement, according to Gallup. So, how do you create lunch and learn sessions that people will actually want to attend?
In this article, we’ll dive into what these sessions are, tips for crafting a great program, and the best topics for lunch and learn sessions.
Lunch and learn sessions are informational (and informal) lunchtime meetings, usually held within the workplace or remotely, that bring coworkers together to learn something new. They’re usually held over, you guessed it, lunch!
Typically, lunch and learns are reserved for individual teams or large departments to cross-educate. They teach people about a new tool or best practice that’s relevant to the industry and it can also focus on professional or life skills. But for a smaller company, you can certainly have a full-org lunch and learn if they’ll impact everyone.
While the main goal is education around a specific topic, lunch and learn sessions are also a prime opportunity for teammates and coworkers to catch up or get to know each other while building new skills. And considering that coworker relationships are a strong engagement driver, this can work wonders for boosting employee morale.
Without an interesting topic, lunch and learns can start to feel like “forced family fun” that eats up your team’s lunch break (no pun intended). You need to ensure you pick engaging topics for lunch and learn sessions so employees actually want to attend.
The best topics to tackle typically fall into a few categories. Some of the most common include skills and knowledge related to your business/team, hard or soft skills, and life skills. The topics that will be most impactful will depend on a few factors, including your key priorities, industry, your company values, and, of course, your employees.
For example, I’ve attended lunch and learns hosted via Microsoft Teams, walking through everything from animal care practices to deep-diving into the new marketing strategies. They can be structured like professional development seminars (TED Talks style), or they can feel more like trendy “PowerPoint nights with friends,” where a different speaker stands up to share their role, a project, or a skill.
Here are a few topics for lunch and learn sessions to inspire you and to make your team’s time well-spent:
We’ve already gotten into a few of the benefits of lunch and learn sessions for your team and org. But if you’re not convinced yet, let’s dive deeper into a few of the key benefits:
Gone are the days when “we have a ping pong table!” is the employee engagement perk it used to be (ah, the old millennial dream of chasing basement hangouts). Lunch and learns give teams a space to get together, catch up, and connect as people in a way that remote days or busy in-office days might not always create space for.
Often, lunch and learns are hosted by teams or individuals at a company to showcase their work, a project, or a special skill. This provides a unique and more laid-back leadership and growth opportunity and publicizes employees’ work in a fresh way, all while supporting presentation and public speaking skill growth.
Almost like a show and tell, you can find employees who are interested in hosting a talk about a successful project or life accomplishment they’re proud of. It’s also a great chance for them to directly express the impact they have on the company to leadership figures.
Setting aside intentional time for employees to learn hard and soft skills will reinforce that you care as an employer. If you can find topics on strategies that inform their role and help them grow, they will further their knowledge and efficiency. When they already have a busy workload, this can help take something off their plate and reduce any work related pressure they’re feeling.
On top of that, lunch and learn sessions have the ability to spark cross-team collaboration opportunities that may not have come up had they not been involved. Creating natural points of connection is how the best ideas are generated and can lead to exciting ideas or projects with positive outcomes.
While these sessions can be powerful for employee engagement, cross-functional learning, and collaboration, you want to make sure you're approaching them thoughtfully.
Here are the most common challenges you'll want to avoid:
From providing lunch ideas your employees will actually enjoy to ensuring topics are engaging, there’s plenty to consider for your program. Here are a few key tips to help you host lunch and learn sessions that your team will get excited about.
Know your audience. Really understanding what your team, department, and company want to learn about will help you create sessions that people want to join for reasons beyond the free lunch.
Not sure what your employees really want to learn or talk about? Leave it up to them! You can have employees vote on the topics or submit their own ideas. You can always mix it up, having some predetermined topics one time and empowering employees to choose what they learn next another time.
Lunch breaks are precious, and you want to reward your team or department for taking time out of their lunch break to join your program. What better way to get people excited about coming together than by providing great food?
Fooda makes it easy for employees to choose from some of their favorite local spots, while taking the coordination off your plate. Fooda’s delivery and catering solutions take the logistics out of providing a great lunch and learn, so you can focus on the content and experience.
Fooda’s got you covered with easy office lunch delivery; all you need to worry about is making sure there’s enough time left for the Q&A.
You might throw the most interesting lunch and learn ever, but remember: you’re still asking employees to take time out of their downtime. So be time-sensitive. Ensure that your programs don’t run too long.
Setting a time limit on the speaking portion to have room left for discussions, questions, and connection is always a good rule of thumb. If your teams aren’t able to talk about what they learned, they might not walk away from the sessions with much value.
As we mentioned above, if it’s the busiest time of year for a specific team or for your org in general, it might not be the best time for the monthly lunch and learn.
Similarly, be mindful of how often you’re hosting them. Does your team or company prefer them on a monthly basis? Quarterly? An ambitious weekly? Keep an eye on attendance, survey your teams, and see where the sweet spot is for your company.
If you have a hybrid schedule or employees that work fully from home, don’t forget to offer remote-friendly options. It’s easy to do by sending a quick virtual meeting invite. This makes them accessible for everyone and doesn’t leave anyone out.
The tl;dr is that a great lunch and learn requires two things to be the main buzz in the team chat channel: compelling content and good food.
You might already have a list of topics you’re eager to bring to the team. But the food? Leave that to the experts.
In the pleading words of Tim Robinson in an I Think You Should Leave sketch, “you can’t skip lunch.” The same goes for employees attending lunch and learn sessions. Ensure they don’t skip a meal while ensuring you have enough bandwidth to coordinate a great session, and give Fooda a try.
