Why “Brown Bag Lunches” Are So Important
We call them “Brown Bag Lunches”, others call them “Lunch and Learns” or “Book Clubs”. Whatever you call it, these informal knowledge sharing events are important to your company.
What is a Brown Bag Lunch?
It is an informal (optional) meeting, training session or presentation that happens typically over lunch where the participants bring their own lunch (hence the name — brown bag).
Our topics for brown bag lunches have varied widely from technical topics, to working as a remote company to sales and marketing and everything in between.
We here at Panoptic think brown bag lunches are vital to our company. As a small company we all have to wear multiple hats. That means we are constantly learning new skills. It’s important that we share that knowledge across the company. But regardless of the size of your company, sharing knowledge or diving deeper into a topic can not only benefit the individuals who participate but benefit the company as a whole.
The benefits of having a brown bag lunch are:
- sharing knowledge (cross train)
- learning something new
- exploring a topic deeper
- fostering your company’s philosophy of continuous improvement/learning
- leveraging the expertise within your company
- create a learning culture within your company
The ROI on brown bag lunches is incredibly high, since they are “Free”. It doesn’t cost the company any money. One could argue that there is an “opportunity cost” for the time spent in the brown bag meeting, but if it’s over lunch that argument falls apart . And if it’s not over lunch, I would say the benefits outweigh the opportunity cost of that time in the meeting.
Does your company support brown bag lunches? If not, how about introducing the idea and starting one on your own. Pick a topic you are passionate about, invite a few colleagues to a brown bag lunch and see where it goes! Let me know how it went and what people thought of it.
I am a Partner at Panoptic Development Inc. I frequently write about web application development, tips on making you and your teams more efficient and general project management topics.
