In our office we started a lunchtime walk. We eat our lunch and whoever wants to participate, we head out for a 30 minute walk. It might not be enough, but it's better than the nothing before.
My understanding is, unless the employer is paying you during lunch, they can’t mandate what you
do. The only problems are 1) it’s not good socially if everyone else is eating lunch and you’re doing something else, and 2) your employer may not give or allow a long break during work hours, but I don’t how common that is (or how it would be justified, considering you’re not working for less hours).
I purposefully go out for lunch, despite office providing for lunch, exactly for this. I have to walk and catch a breath of fresh air around lunch time :-). Speaking of which I'm heading out for lunch!
One of the best decisions I ever made at my prior job. I'd take a solid hour for lunch outside, typically with colleagues. Additionally, 2 colleagues and I took a 45 min walk at 330pm everyday. I'd argue that I was significantly more productive by doing this and much much happier.
Wow, that's weird. I need the one hour break from my colleagues as with how our office is laid out it can get pretty busy and noisy and I can't listen to music all day.
Luckily where I work there's a small boating lake that I can walk around just across the road which is incredibly nice to walk around for half an hour every lunch time. It's also lucky that my colleagues all like to go alone for lunch too :D
I get inundated with conversations, discussions and emails so much during work-time that lunch time is often a good time of solitude for me to organize my plan of action for the rest of the day. I usually take a short walk around London's alley ways while eating my sandwich - nice experience, to be honest.
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.
I'm not sure I'm following. You are proposing to bring the lunch from home and hide in some conference room the whole day, but why go back to the office at all then?
I almost always take lunch, even when I'm very busy. Indeed, especially when I'm very busy. I always found it tremendously invigorating to get out of the office and walk around outside, particularly when I worked in Manhattan where you could totally drown yourself in the crowd and push out work thoughts.
I've never seen an office culture that minded people taking a walk (unless the team was in war room or something). A lot of workers go out to buy lunch anyway.
For hourly production workers that have to clock in/out and may only get a fixed 30 lunch break then it is more difficult.
I agree about sitting at your desk, but a quick lunch is great for me because it allow me to take a proper lunch break, I can swallow some food then go for a walk listening to an audio book for half an hour.
That's a good idea. Travel time may be an issue (I'm looking to network with developers outside my company). Also I feel that the type of people who won't take a detour on the way home from work will also eat lunch at their desk so that they can leave a few minutes sooner.
I wonder if employers will be more receptive to regular breaks for knowledge workers who are mostly sedentary. One befits of working from home before being mandated back to the office was being able to go on a walk during lunch and less-critical meetings.
Or the classic: have lunch with your colleagues and then walk back to the office. I hope you didn't take all the insulin in the restaurant, just half and half back in the office. It's a nasty drop otherwise...
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