An ode to the lunch group
By: Kushal Shah
Tags: Work, Lunch, Culture, Empathy, Workplace

Culture had a very different connotation while growing up. It probably meant following age-old customs and traditions, celebrating festivals, visiting temples, eating a particular type of food etc. On a very meta-level, it meant doing things the way that you are supposed to do. However, the definition changed completely when I went to college where I was exposed to a wide variety of people with no common denominator of a language, region, or religion to fall back to.

Source: Atlassian.com

Culture at my hostel meant having fun together, helping each other with assignments, studying the night before exams, playing cricket and ofcourse talking about girls. I was a part of a few clubs and culture there meant inducting people who share the same vision, pulling all-nighters to organize events and festivals, raising sponsorships, practicing for and participating in competitions. The definition kept on changing wherever I went and at University of Washington where I was the president of the Indian club, culture meant a collective sum of being loyal to the old world and being fluent in the new.

When I joined Grab, the office was located on the 65th floor of Seattle’s tallest building, the Columbia Tower. I had joined a company which has it’s operations in eight different countries in South East Asia and has R&D centers in a total of nine countries. With the center of gravity fifteen timezones away, one was always conflicted between converging to the common culture and finding their own unique identity.

Making matters worse was the fact that Grab decided to open another office in Bellevue to attract talent from the other side of the bridge. For those who are not aware, the bridge connecting Seattle to Bellevue is perceived to be a mental barrier that people hate to cross. This meant that the Seattle office was left with 20 odd people on a given day. People would either be traveling to the region or would be in office for selective hours to manage their own schedules and happiness without critical mass was an apparent challenge that needed to be addressed.

Having been away from home for about ten years had taught me a secret to build friendships, which was to eat together. I proposed this idea and a handful few in the Seattle office collectively decided to eat lunch together. This started with me taking rounds of the office floor at sharp 12PM, asking everyone if they wanted to eat lunch “now”. A few of us would then sit at the lunch area and others would slowly start piling up. If the lunch area was full, we would book the conference rooms and huddle up there. Taking rounds evolved into creating a slack group, where one of us would post a simple @here lunch? message, and that would serve as an indication for others to start wrapping their work and warm their lunch boxes. As introverted tech people, we seldom interact with people from different teams and lunch provided an opportunity for people to know other people better.

Everyone got so used to this habit of eating at 12, that people would ping me at 11:30, saying that they are going to get their food and should be back by noon. Sometimes I would prompt people to get something to eat if I knew that they had not brought their lunch. Conversations over lunch prompted us to start regular trivia events, where the same set of people would assemble up for an hour and half of trivia. Asking random questions to senior leaders prompted us to start a podcast, where we thought that we could just record our lunch conversations and share it with a wider audience to learn from.

This year has been a difficult one for most of us and a lot of my colleagues that I used to have lunch with have moved on. Before this year is lost in the sands of time, I wanted to take this opportunity to cherish memories of things that made work fun and made me realize that work colleagues can even be friends.