A plea against eating at your desk

Whenever I see someone eating at their desk at work, my heart sinks. It suggests to me that there's no time to take a break, people don't want to be seen as the person slacking or that yes - someone actually prefers to eat at their desk.

Apparently, 43% of the British population in 2020 did not take a lunch break away from their desks that year. That is staggering.

This national behaviour has hidden costs such as increasing risks of overeating, increasing multitasking (reducing productivity) and increasing sedentarism (which is linked to the development of various health issues). But let's be real, we all have similar moments at home too where we are distracted and sit on the sofa or in front of a screen.

What is often forgotten is how the normalising of this behaviour is damaging for team health.

Meal times, just like sleep or doing exercise, are a time for restoring yourself but are also a great way to connect with others.

To me this has always felt obvious because, in my personal life, I love eating with others and having convivial moments. However, it wasn't until I worked somewhere that insisted we have lunch together every Friday that I understood the power of eating together in a work context.

We'd accumulate problems over the week and somehow on Friday after lunch we would often just have 'eureka' moments when things would click into place. We wouldn't even talk about work usually but that connecting, like sleep, just unconsciously helped unlocked solutions and enable free flow of ideas once we were back in the office.

Studies have shown that I'm not alone in noticing this: people do actually work better together when they eat together.

This particular study look at firefighters across the US and found that the simple act of regularly eating together at work contributed to their performance in fighting fires and saving lives. There's also a podcast here that talks about a similar impact on London's firefighters.

This knowledge has obviously been utilised in office designs of companies such as Apple who famously position a single restaurant in their huge campuses as a way to get people to eat together, break silos and cross-fertilise ideas across the organisation.

So why are we still eating at our desks?