Take a good look at those leftovers sitting in your lunchbox. Eye that egg salad sandwich. Stare at that instant soup mix.
Your weekday lunch has superpowers.
Here’s why: Eating with your co-workers may help build camaraderie, foster deeper work relationships and boost productivity. Firefighters who eat together, for example, perform better together in their life-or-death line of work than those who don’t, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Human Performance. “There’s a different kind of intimacy that comes with sharing food and drink with somebody,” says Kevin Kniffin, visiting assistant professor of organizational behavior and leadership in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University who authored the study. “The kind of bonding that can come through eating together has value in terms of cohesiveness in the work team.”
In addition to potentially improving productivity, those who lunch with co-workers may earn a much-needed break, establish office friendships and score a chance to do some casual, low-level networking.
Eating at your desk, on the other hand, has the power to get a lot of spinach mysteriously stuck in your keyboard.
So, when the lunch hour rolls around, here’s why you should pick up your salad and head to the cafeteria with a few colleagues.
1. It boosts productivity. After studying firehouses for 15 months, Kniffin and his colleagues found that firefighters who ate together worked better together. In fact, some firefighters went so far as to eat two meals — one with their spouses and one with their co-workers — in order to participate in this essential team-building activity.
Those of us who don’t fight fires each day can still take away some lessons from the study, says Kniffin, who notes that it’s not necessarily a causal relationship, but it’s still a relationship.
“Look at any tall building and you’re going to find companies already committing significant resources to worksite eateries,” Kniffin says. “Companies are showing intuition that there are benefits — work benefits, performance benefits — to co-workers eating together.”
2. It’s a networking tool. Having a lunch buddy can also be an effective way to do some in-house networking with colleagues. That holds true for maintaining friendly relationships with office peers — and for making connections to colleagues in far-flung departments. “Left up to our own devices, we end up having lunch with people who sit with us, who are on the same teams as us,” says Michael Soto, co-founder of Spark Collaboration, which introduces co-workers for one-on-one meetings to build relationships and learn about other areas of the company. “We encourage people to reach out and talk to people from different social circles.”
Soto sees eating with someone from another department — or grabbing coffee or tea — as an important way to break down the silos that exist in an office. It can be a way to share different perspectives on companywide goals or brainstorm solutions to challenges with someone from a different background. “It lets you get an understanding of a part of the company that you typically don’t have,” he says.
Some employers may already encourage this cross-office unity with organized lunches, such as affinity group meetings, brown bag seminars and other sponsored events. It’s a cheaper way to build unity than herding everyone off to the ropes course for a team-building exercise. And it takes care of a biological necessity: Everyone has to eat.
3. It makes you happier. “If we can foster an environment where people are establishing friendships with the people around them, people will be happier at their job, almost regardless of the work they’re doing,” says Andrew Horn, co-founder and CEO of Tribute, a video-montage platform, and frequent speaker on networking and communication.
Having a friend in the office to eat with can lessen the dread of trudging to work every day. Lunch buddies have a few minutes to loosen their ties and workshop solutions to office problems or just dish on the latest news. Of course, it’s wise to keep the office gossip and trash talk to a minimum at lunch, especially if you’re eating in a communal space where the wrong person may overhear it.
Says Horn: “Even if it’s not the most natural thing for you to go and spend time with your co-workers, spending time to develop those relationships is something I think you’ll be proud of as a human being and a professional in the long run.”
More from U.S. News
8 Ways the Holidays Bring Out the Worst in Your Co-Workers
10 Job Resolutions to Revitalize Your Career in 2016
3 Reasons to Eat Lunch With Your Co-Workers originally appeared on usnews.com
