Chewing the fat: Breakrooms often create more content employees

Mark Trenton, a 41-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative, says

he missed eating with his co-workers last year. Post-Covid, Trenton says his company closed the breakroom and as a result, employees left the building for lunch, ate at their desks or in Trenton’s case, didn’t eat at all — at least a regular lunch.

“If I’m in the office, I kind of snack at my desk all day, just like I do at home,” he says. “I liked lunch because I liked catching up with people, not my turkey sandwich.”

And after working from home for nearly a year, Trenton is back in the office. The breakroom is open and he says he’s more than ready to eat again with co-workers. Not everyone’s there yet, Trenton says, but they’re getting there. “It’s a work in progress but we’re getting back to some normalcy, little by little,” he says.

Generation gap

A few years ago, Stenson says she facilitated a trial project between a stockmarket forecasting startup and a St. Louis bank. When banking representatives visited the prospective business, which was housed at T-REX, a 160,000-squarefoot shared workspace in downtown

St. Louis building that hosts more than 100 small businesses, they were “blown away,” according to Stenson. Her client walked into the space and sat with the prospective team at a large table while they were eating lunch.

“He told me later that in a normal setting, anyone younger than him gives off a nervous energy because they always know he’s the money guy, the boss, but in the context of that room, it was completely natural,” Stenson says. “The partnership didn’t work out but my banking client spent about $500,000 opening up the offices on one floor so they had some breathing room and a place for all employees — new hires and senior managers — to socialize.”

Culture shock

Rebecca Hooks, a student counselor with the University of California system, says new hires are often used to sharing space. “There’s a lot of bonding in college during down time when students are not going to class or working their part-time jobs. Students spend four years eating together and studying together” she says. “Now these kids go off to their first jobs and all of a sudden that communal spirit is gone.”

Then Covid hit.

“So now. they’re expected to eat lunch at home or at their office desk or to eat alone in the building’s cafeteria or at a local restaurant. For a lot of people, it’s completely counterintuitive to how they feel they should be spending that portion of their day,” Hooks says.

Companies that want to improve productivity often fail to focus on relationships among their employees, Hooks says. “How many companies have you seen that have a conference room on each floor that gets used once a week and a tiny kitchen that gets used throughout the day? Office space planners don’t even consider the fact that their employees would want to spend time together during lunch,” she says. “Now look at places like Costco or factories or hospitals. All of these places, for the most part, have larger breakrooms because they know their shift employees will be eating together. Walk into a warehouse breakroom at noon and you’ll hear a lot of laughter and a lot of conversation. Same with a breakroom near a nurses’

station in a hospital.