<i> Rule #1 – Eat lunch together around a table. </i>
Not sure about this. It is fine to have lunch together twice a week. Do it every day? Unless someone really enjoys talking and being listened.
I enjoy discussion with colleagues. I find, though, if more than 4 persons are involved, it is more efficient to be in a formal place or follow a formal procedure. Otherwise, 90% of time tends to be on trivial issues.
If lunch together is for socializing, I don't see why twice a week is not enough. I worked in such an environment before and the topics during lunch were mostly the same everyday. Most topics were not interesting. To be fair, it is hard to have an interesting or insightful talk with 10 people. The talks that made me think and made me intrigued were always with 1 or 2 colleagues. We can go out for a drink. If the topic is work-related, we can have a 15 minutes coffee break and discuss it.
I understand that lunch is also supposed to give people a break after working hard for 3~4 hours. But lunch together might not be a break for some people. Sometimes after constantly working for 3 hours, especially if the work requires me to be very concentrated, I just want to have a quiet lunch time, to relax, to read 20 minutes of history or other books to adjust my brain, to plan what to do in the afternoon, or walk in the sun for 10 minutes. At these occasions, lunch together and talking to other people only make me exhausted.
People are different. It is fine, though, if the boss wants to establish this lunch-together culture and exercise the cookie-cutter. There are always start-ups that don't require this.
Once or twice a week is completely fine. I work at Thumbtack (and have since the first meal!), and occasionally if I am in right in the middle of something or need a break I'll eat at my desk. It isn't a big deal, and I certainly don't agree that people must eat together everyday.
However, one of the key things our culture is that everybody is always welcome at the table, and there is never any issue with somebody pulling up a chair anywhere and joining any conversation. You certainly don't have to if you aren't in the mood, but you always can. I'm also not a big foodie at all, but the food is really really good, and that helps a lot :)
I spent 5 years at Googs. Good food in the office is great. It's way better having healthy food than just sushi or pizza delivery all the times.
Also giving your people time to spend alone and step out for lunch or just a walk is great too and I missed that often. You don't just "produce" by sitting at your desk and staring at the screen.
Also making people feel kind of obliged to attend social event on a weekly basis or even more often, isn't that fun. People have their life and family back home and I am sure some of them would like to eat dinner with their loved ones or just hang out with friends.
Time out and alone is as valuable as team spirit I believe...
Using a big residential house as an office for 3-12 employees probably gets you a great kitchen (most 3-4BR higher-end houses have better kitchens than most offices), which helps this a lot.
From what I've seen, you can get a chef 2 days/week for about $100 per day plus food costs to prepare food for 4 days (that day and the next day), and then do catered food (or a group trip out) to a specialty restaurant, at least to start out.
I believe in team building over lunch, but free food is a terrible attractant and retention item.
People who are intrinsically motivated to do excellent work might be motivated to join due to food, but they really join for autonomy, mastery and purpose. Free food is none of these things. And ultimately you end up attracting people who are after the perks, and may not end up contributing to a passionate environment.
Free food helps people focus, as the post says, when you're not figuring out what to eat, mooching out the building then being a bit annoyed that there's a queue and then you're forking over cash, you're not focused or thinking about problems.
You gain purpose when you're sat around a table bonding with teammates and bouncing ideas. The lunchtimes I had as an intern at Google were incredibly valuable to me. They were hours which I didn't consider downtime at all.
“Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients,
or ingredients you can’t pronounce.”
This comes across as being poor advice. Some of the worst processed foods (sauces found in a supermarket isle) often contain 90% of one of the following staples: water, tomato, potato, onion, apple, corn, carrot, ...
It looks healthy but the remainder of the product is salt, refined sugar, perhaps a dash of another staple ingredient and if you're lucky and 1% herbs or spices that you can't taste anyway because they were cutting costs.
Quality food will often contain 10-20 fresh ingredients in varying and balanced quantities. A mix of greens from different families, other vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, herbs, spices, etc.
Which will be better for your body:
1. A diet consisting of tomato, potato and salt?
2. A diverse diet that combines dozens of fresh/raw ingredients.
That's just one of pollan's "rules". Taken out of context, I agree. Put it in context with the others where he suggests, for example "Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad" (or...to paraphrase...eat fresh foods)...and it's fine.
I also think his "rules" can be somewhat hyperbolic. It's not "anything" with more than 5 ingredients....as, for example, a great hot n sour soup has WAY more than that. Holistically his rules would be...understand what you're eating..eat less processed food...eat mostly plants, etc.
This could be a core culture issue for your company.
I did this for my first startup and it gave us a great company culture. We hired a "mom" that took care of us the nerds. Over time, we knew that we could always take up the discussion during lunch time in the kitchen, like on architecture wanderings, business cases, ideas, issues, etc.
The food should be part of the company's culture. What most of the US people don't get, is that food is the fuel for the body.
If you eat crap you'll perform not that great. If you eat well, you'll perform a lot better.
You feel more agile mentally and physically. Start to think about food as a key moment of your life.
We pretty much follow all these rules at my company, and it's wonderful. We eat better food than you could ever get delivered and get excellent bonding time out of eating together :)
There is something to be said about being able to keep your employees from disappearing from the office for 30-60 minutes for lunch in the middle of the day.
Think about it, if you have a chef preparing food in your office, you and your team can work right up until the minute the food is ready, take a 15 second walk and be seated at a meal. When you are done, you walk 15 seconds back to your desk.
At the end of the day, it depends on how you value your team's time.
That actually sounds like a really bad idea. No exercise, food delivered nearly to your mouth, sit for an hour, go back to work immediately after eating?
How about: walk 20 minutes to food, eat something different every day, relax for 20 minutes getting back to work, get fresh air.
Part of it is about incentive alignment. There's about 100 ways to make food 1% tastier with 5% more calories. Restaurants make money from food that is tasty and perceived as healthy, regardless of whether it's healthy or not so they tend to utilize the full arsenal of tricks.
When you have a chef in house, they're being paid to make the food to your specifications so it can often be significantly healthier.
The benefits of chef-cooked food (vs. delivery) are more subjective, but I can see situations in which an argument could be made for a net benefit to the startup. If you make an effort to restrict yourself to healthy food (along with other "healthy" lifestyle choices, such as consistent and sufficient sleep), you can realize significant productivity benefits in the types of white collar work that being part of a startup typically entails.
My company works in the same space as Thumbtack, and we eat the same amazing food. The expense is far less than you'd think due to economies of scale.
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING beats a home cooked meal, and that's what the very talented Thea delivers. Good, wholesome food simply cannot be matched in a restaurant.
Early this week Thea was sick and we had to settle for Zero Cater. Zero cater is OK, but everyone was glad when Thea came back.
As for breaks to think, people go for walks. People go sit on a couch for awhile. There's no requirement for everyone to actually eat lunch together. You can eat at your desk if you want. You can even go out to eat if you want, but nobody does because they don't want to miss out on the yummy food ;-)
1. Providing your employees with healthy, freshly cooked meals on-site! A decent cafeteria that actually provides fresh meals is a heavenly gift and beats ordering and take-away pretty much all the time, both in quality and price so if you can pull it off, by all means provide that for your employees! If I was to switch jobs, a good cafeteria has become a must for me now and it would actually be a factor holding me back.
2. Eating together, focus on "family" in the office. At the IT company I used to work for, we had a small kitchen and a huge table for everyone and very often we would end up eating lunch together, cooked by us or just ordered pizza/kebaps, and we would crack open a beer in the evening, we would play DotA over the LAN in the office until late at night, we would have a movies night, we'd celebrate successes and our xmas party in the office quite often and if an employee wanted to, they could even use the office for a private party with close friends or have their pen+paper rounds there because the table was really damn amazing and the location was right downtown, easy to reach for everyone. What this came down to: this office was way more than just an office; it was a place were we worked and were you also spent countless amazing and fun hours as well. Without failure every time I stepped into that office, I felt a bit "at home" away from home and it was just always a great, relaxed atmosphere and everyone just loved being in the office because you instantly associated it with more than just work.
Emphasizing and acting on the simple idea that the office should be more than just a boring 9-5 work place, more than just a regular office, was definitely one of the best things our boss did there.
Not sure about this. It is fine to have lunch together twice a week. Do it every day? Unless someone really enjoys talking and being listened.
I enjoy discussion with colleagues. I find, though, if more than 4 persons are involved, it is more efficient to be in a formal place or follow a formal procedure. Otherwise, 90% of time tends to be on trivial issues.
If lunch together is for socializing, I don't see why twice a week is not enough. I worked in such an environment before and the topics during lunch were mostly the same everyday. Most topics were not interesting. To be fair, it is hard to have an interesting or insightful talk with 10 people. The talks that made me think and made me intrigued were always with 1 or 2 colleagues. We can go out for a drink. If the topic is work-related, we can have a 15 minutes coffee break and discuss it.
I understand that lunch is also supposed to give people a break after working hard for 3~4 hours. But lunch together might not be a break for some people. Sometimes after constantly working for 3 hours, especially if the work requires me to be very concentrated, I just want to have a quiet lunch time, to relax, to read 20 minutes of history or other books to adjust my brain, to plan what to do in the afternoon, or walk in the sun for 10 minutes. At these occasions, lunch together and talking to other people only make me exhausted.
People are different. It is fine, though, if the boss wants to establish this lunch-together culture and exercise the cookie-cutter. There are always start-ups that don't require this.