It's time to Skip 'Lunch and Learn'

When organisations want to invest more in learning, a common suggestion is Lunch and Learn—a Brown Bag session. However, this may not be sending the message we think it is. Find out why in my latest.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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One perennial quick-win suggestion for improving learning is the Lunch and Learn. Leaders often welcome these, and changemakers love to suggest a good ol’ Brown Bag that calling out something with so much good intention feels uncomfortable. Picking this option to improve learning efforts over other options may undermine what your organisation tries to achieve with learning, so I will press on for you, dear reader (who am I kidding? I love to highlight counter-intuitive truths 😅).

Why Do Organisations Use Lunch and Learn Sessions?

Let’s start by understanding why organisations reach for a ‘Lunch and Learn’ in the first place. Usually, there is some identification of knowledge gaps in the organisation, maybe familiarity with products, services, tools, or even capabilities, such as learning what other teams offer.

The Lunch and Learn is appealing because it directly responds to the knowledge gap problem—a commitment to pull the right people together for an allotment of time, usually ‘the lunch hour’, to address the need directly. What’s not to like?

Leadership likes this ‘fix’ because it seems to be at a negligible cost, whether the company provides the lunch or the attendees bring their own (the origin of the term ‘brown bag’ refers to the brown bags employees might bring their lunch from home).

What is the Problem with a Lunch and Learn?

All of this sounds like a win-win, right? So how could all this right be wrong? The answer lies in what leaders value in this option and the constraints that come with that.

What is the Message We Send Learning at Lunch Time Instead of Work Time?

When an organisation needs to increase learning but is only willing to invest employee break time to accommodate it, it sends a wrong message about how much we value learning.

We say with our actions, “We do not value learning enough to do it in work time”.

This may seem minor, but the effect can be huge culturally. It can lead to no one in the organisation learning or improving their capabilities in tune with the organisation’s needs, which can be fatal from a competitive standpoint.

At many organisations, there may already be a need to swim upstream to devote any time to learning. At some companies, I’ve heard leaders make statements such as ‘Learn on your own time’, which suggests they have entirely reneged on their obligation to ensure the organisation has the capabilities to meet the challenges it faces.

If you want to shift a culture towards improvement, you must take a bolder step than Lunch and Learn. Don’t be tempted to start there because it’s easy for people to agree with it. Lunch and Learn may be the first and last contribution to organisational learning.

Indicative of a Failure in Strategic Prioritisation

When there’s pressure to deliver and a gap in the team's capability to produce as needed due to their capabilities or knowledge, it can often feel like nothing can move and that things like learning must be added to everything else that has been prioritised.

If you don’t change how you approach the capability problem, it will remain with you for the long term. Whatever gaps are impacting your efficiency or effectiveness will stay with you. You need to be strategic about how you approach this issue.

The ‘Lunch and Learn’ is a classic example of ‘Quick Win’ thinking, which can cut you off from a whole range of options, unintentionally, as I cover in this post:

The 'quick wins' fallacy

Being strategic is about choices and your ability to say no to things. If you need to increase the amount of learning so your teams can do their work effectively or more efficiently, then something should be given to make time for learning and addressing your capability gaps. If you aren’t doing that, you are not investing in line with your needs, and Lunch and Learn is a shallow effort by comparison.

The ‘Lunch and Learn’ Format is Limited

In addition to the poor messaging, the ‘Lunch and Learn’ format is limited by its structure. You aren’t starting with what you need to best support the organisation’s learning needs; you are beginning with the constraints of the format, which likely won’t match your needs.

The key constraints of ‘Lunch and Learn’ are:

• The Lunch and Learn format is limited in time - usually the length of the ‘lunch hour’ or less. This may suit some learning but not all.

• Lunch and Learn often presumes a more informal learning environment, which can be great for learning but only in some situations. Being limited to the Lunch and Learn format may undermine your learning objectives.

• Where lunch is supplied, you can conflate the messaging associated with providing the meal. Is it a reward? Is it an incentive to attend the learning? Are people attending because they want to learn or because they want the free lunch? The activities that can be expected to be completed in the session will need to be in consideration of a meal taking place as well.

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What are the Alternatives to ‘Lunch and Learn’?

1. A multi-pronged approach to learning.

2. Blocking out learning time during work hours.

   1. On-the-job learning - e.g. Shadowing / Pairing / Mobbing / Role Rotations etc.

   2. Internal experiential learning - e.g. Coding Katas, Hackathons, Learning Games, Coding competitions, etc.

   3. Externally-supported training.