A lot of days at the office can become draining if employees spend most of the day working. It can be detrimental to the company because it may result in them working less efficiently. Organizing a team lunch can help give tired employees a break and keep them healthy so they can work. Here’s how you can start planning for a healthy team lunch:
Ask For Everyone’s Diet and Restrictions
Before anything else, you must ask everyone if they have any special diets or food restrictions. Since one of your goals is to include everyone who’s part of the team, you should make sure that there’s food that everyone can eat. If a person, for example, is vegan, and all the food has animal products, then they’d most likely feel left out.
When you have the data, you can start creating your meal plan. Even though it’s lunch, you can also include healthy snacks from SnackNation. Include food options that those with a special diet can eat. If everyone can eat whatever’s on the table, then no one would feel left out. Therefore, no one feels excluded, and they wouldn’t feel resentment towards you or anyone else in the team.
Pick A Date
You can’t have a team lunch every day. It’s inconvenient and can waste a lot of precious time. You’ll be spending lots of time every day planning team lunches and actually having it since it’s bonding time among your coworkers. Here are some tips:
- Check if the company has any urgent work or any deadlines.
- Ask for everyone’s schedule and availability.
- Pick a date that works for everyone.
- Plan the team lunch a few days before the set date.
- Do it occasionally so you can reap the benefits of a team lunch instead of sacrificing your work time.
Pick A Location
Staying within the office is okay as long as everyone can fit inside the lunch room. If the lunchroom can’t accommodate everyone in the team, consider looking for a different place. It’s crucial that everyone has a place to sit. As much as possible, pick a place that has a calm atmosphere so everyone can relax and forget about the stress of work.
Try to encourage everyone to stay within the room instead of just getting some food and then returning to their desk to eat. It’s why you need to find a big enough location for everyone as much as possible.
Order Great Food Options
Once you finish planning your meal options and you already have a time and place, you can start deciding where to get the food. You can choose to have caterers, order from restaurants, or even have everyone bring in food to share. You can bring a delicious and healthy salad that you made at home to share with everyone.
The most convenient thing to do is to order in food or catering if everyone would be too busy to prepare meals to share with everyone else. If cooking at home would put more burden, then that won’t do anyone any good.
Engage In Conversation
You can make the team lunch as casual or as work-related as you want. If your primary goal is to feed your employees with healthy food for their well-being, that’s great. But you can also take advantage of this time to form bonds and make casual conversation, or use that time to get work done.
You can use team lunches for brainstorming for your projects, but keep the tone casual. Don’t put too much pressure on the conversations, so they don’t stress out your employees and ruin the whole lunch for everybody.
Allow some time for everyone to speak up. If somebody wants to share some personal stuff, let them, but also know when to return to the matters at hand. The important thing to remember is to be clear on the goal of the team lunch.
Get Some Feedback
Some feedback after the team lunch would be helpful for your future lunches. You don’t have to pass around survey forms to everyone who was there. Instead, you can have casual talks with anyone and find out if they liked how things turned out. Whatever they say may be helpful when you plan for the next team lunch.
Final Thoughts
Team lunches are a way for you to keep not only a healthy workplace but also healthy employees. If you have great food options that are healthy and delicious, as well as productive conversations, then it can give benefits to your company. A successful team lunch gets results instead of drowning your employees in work every day.
