A reader writes:
I have a question about working lunches. I manage a small team, and I recently held a brainstorming session for some professional development ideas for next year that the whole team can participate in. One of the options I suggested is (company-sponsored) lunch and learns, where we watch a work-related webinar and debrief, invite an expert to present on a relevant topic, or have a team member present on a special skill. These are pretty common at many corporations, and I was thinking maybe quarterly at most. One of my employees (who is new to the industry and has been here about a year) said, “I don’t want lunch and learns. I get paid to work eight hours a day, so why would I work nine?” I found this so very off-putting. But I need a sanity check.
I don’t particularly want to work nine hours a day either (or eight, or seven…). But we’re salaried, and I think company-provided working lunches are pretty common in this type of work. I’m not attached to the idea and will scrap it if no one wants to do it; I just want to know if I’m off-base by being so annoyed at that response. This employee has expressed aspirations of taking on more responsibility and being promoted, but I didn’t get promoted by expressing opinions like that (and this isn’t a generational conflict — we’re the same age). Is this something I need to address, or is this just the prevalent mentality that I need to get over as a manager?
It’s true that lunch-and-learns and other working lunches are very common; you’re not coming up with an odd or outrageous idea.
It’s also true that they encroach on time that would otherwise be employees’ own, and people aren’t wrong to dislike them for that reason. If your team doesn’t currently have a culture of doing working lunches, adding them in is going to frustrate some people (especially people who use lunch to decompress and not be “on,” or to handle errands or personal calls, and so forth).
Moreover, if watching work-related webinars or listening to experts present serves a business need that you want people to prioritize, why does it have to happen over lunch rather than during regular work time? Carve out real work time for it if it’s important. And if it’s not important enough for that, maybe it’s not important enough to expect people to give up a lunch break for.
And again, I know it’s the norm in some fields. But since it’s not currently the norm on your team, why add it in when you don’t have to?
All that said, “I get paid to work eight hours a day, so why would I work nine?” isn’t the way being salaried works in a lot of fields, and if you see other signs that your employee is bringing that mentality to the job in ways that will cause problems, that’s worth addressing — if only to clarify what they can expect in your field.
But I would also be wary of thinking “I didn’t get promoted by expressing opinions like that” — because the culture is changing around this kind of thing, and that’s a good thing and we should welcome it. If you can point to specific ways that mindset will be a problem in your field — like, for example, that people sometimes need to respond to client needs outside of business hours — you should. But if you’re just bristling at the sentiment on principle, challenge yourself on that and ask if it’s genuinely wrong or just different than how you’re used to thinking.
A note: I expect to see a lot of “lunch-and-learns are an inappropriate encroachment; never do them” in the comment section. But they’re a very common thing in many fields, and it’s naive to pretend they’re not. Still, though, it sounds like they’re not currently the norm for your team, and there’s no pressing need to change that.
