Lessons from Property Finder Lunch and Learn Sessions
By: Dina Mohammad-Laity
Tags: People, Culture, Learning And Development, Learning

The Value of Lunch and Learn Programmes

Since the start of 2019 we have been running an initiative at Property Finder HQ — Lunch and Learn sessions. These started as relatively small groups of tech, product and data colleagues gathering together to discuss a particular topic.

This has expanded across the year and now we’re welcoming colleagues from across the entire company to participate in an ever broader range of sessions.

This programme has grown organically, and so we undertook a survey of attendees to understand why they attend and how we can make sure future sessions are as valuable as possible.

This blog seeks to share our experiences to date, as well as share the feedback from the Lunch and Learn attendees at Property Finder.

What is a Lunch and Learn?

Every week we gather together and one person in the company will present… something! This is usually something related to their job, or perhaps a side project. This will be accompanied by a few slices of tasty pizza (courtesy of Property Finder!), and a question/answer discussion session at the end.

The sessions are voluntary, and held at midday for around 1 hour.

Whilst clearly a free lunch is a nice perk, the programme is so much more than that; it’s a statement of our culture, our values and the way we work — cross functionally with a deep respect and interest in each others’ expertise.

Why Host Lunch and Learns?

There are a host of reasons why we launched the Lunch and Learn programme, which we believe span personal and business development:

Learn something new

Socialise with colleagues, strengthening the PF community

Support cross functional understanding

Inspire new ideas

Discover new perspectives on problems and solutions

A friendly and open space for people to ask questions

A safe environment for colleagues to practise public speaking

In our survey we asked attendees about their motivations for joining the sessions and we discovered a strong interest in the main objectives of up-skilling and collaboration.

We hypothesised that some attendees were joining to learn new skills to apply to their day jobs, but in fact this was only true in 2 out of 5 cases.

To start with, only two of five participants found the sessions applicable to their work

Having these less formal sessions enable colleagues to learn more about each other and for us that is a key objective and weapon we have against silos, which are common in a fast growing company like Property Finder.

We’ve been working to make the sessions more relevant to the people in the room, so that they can apply what they learn to their jobs.

What do we talk about?

Topics that we’ve hosted so far include:

GIS insights

Hands-on Machine Learning exercises

Data Visualisation

Game Theory (an interactive, hands-on game!)

Introductions to Business Units (Data Finder, International Markets, Mortgage Finder)

Product User Research

SEO

A Day in the Life of a Salesperson

Data Science 101: Interactive Python sessions for beginners

And many more!

If you’re keen to try out a lunch and learn programme at your workplace, here are our top tips to get started

Get the word out!

“Build it and they will come” — someone who never worked in tech, product or Lunch and Learns

Some of the most helpful feedback we received is that we were not communicating upcoming lunch and learn sessions well enough. Throughout the months, we’ve generally announced it on Slack, on the #general channel, as well as specific tech channels.

This in itself caused an issue — many of our friends in sales, finance and marketing don’t use Slack!

“I wish I’d known about that session — I would have loved to attend” — a sign of communication failure

We made a small but significant change in our strategy to announce sessions via email and on Salesforce, as well as Slack announcements. We hoped this would further increase turnout and representation across a wider range of departments — and it did!

We also made a dedicated microsite (using Google Sites — very easy!) to keep track of upcoming sessions, as well as sharing historical slide decks and allowing participants to suggest new topics.

The key successful initiatives:

Slack

Salesforce Chatter

Posters

Company-wide email

Inclusion in newsletter

Lunch and Learn calendar

Prep your speakers

It is important that the weekly speakers know the ‘level’ of the audience. On the whole we expect a wide range of backgrounds in our Lunch and Learn sessions so opening the presentation with a clear introduction, and even an ‘explain like I’m five’ overview of their subject will ensure everyone comes along with you.

Who you are— introduce yourself! A huge number of speakers forget to do this. Just go with the basics, and remember to be human: what is your job, what department do you work in, and some fun facts to lighten the mood. You could even have a round-table icebreaker if the group isn’t too big.

Example: Hi, I’m Dina and I’m Head of Data Science in the Property Finder Data Team. When I’m not leading Lunch and Learn sessions I am at home with my two Dalmatians (yes really!), working on some kind of crafty project, such as painting or sewing.

What is the subject you will discuss today — in clear and uncomplex language, introduce the subject you will be covering. Don’t be afraid to start at level 1; it’s better to have some attendees hear something they already know than leave others behind.

Example: I’ll be talking to you today about data visualisation. They say a picture speaks a thousand words and I would like to share some techniques for making sure those words are heard loud and clear through various charts. Here is my favourite data visualisation…

Use a company-specific example about why this is useful — this makes the talk relatable to something common between your audience, and becomes less abstract. You’ll inspire ideas within your audience and maximise the impact of your presentation!

Example: Property Finder produces a well-known publication twice a year called ‘Trends’ — we use a huge amount of data visualisation in this publication to tell stories about the data and explain trends in the market. Here is an example!

Where possible, make sessions interactive

As we’ve seen, a common motivation to participate in Lunch & Learn (aside from free pizza) is to learn new skills. What better way to reinforce these new skills than to join in as you go?

Of course this is not possible for all subjects, but for many it can take a detached and impersonal lecture and turn it into a learning experience that the participants will remember well.

Are you sitting comfortably?

One of the most frequent pieces of feedback we got was that there were often not enough chairs for attendees. This seems simple enough to solve, but it should also be communicated that late joiners may have to stand in some cases of very popular events (buying yourself more time to grab extra chairs before commencing the talk if needed!).

Food, glorious food!

Throughout the past year we’ve provided pizzas for Lunch and Learn sessions, largely because pizzas are delicious, and also because they’re often the easiest and best value catering option. Some attendees prefer to “brown bag” the session and bring their own lunch.

However, survey feedback frequently requested some healthier options, and so you should consider the dietary preferences of the audience when arranging catering. We have recently trialled healthier wraps in place of pizza, and they were well received by all (except for one person who said they missed the pizza — I guess you can’t please everyone!)

What’s Next?

Following 2019’s successful Lunch and Learn programme we absorbed all the constructive feedback from our attendees’ survey responses. We expanded the range of topics outside of the traditional tech and product themes. Coming up in the following weeks we will have:

Commercial Finance

Digital Marketing

Design/usability testing

And we’ve got a lot more in the pipeline!

We wish you luck with your journey on hosting Lunch and Learn sessions. Please feel free to reach out with questions or comments about our experiences so far.

#alwayslearning

That’s it! Thanks for reading!

If you liked this article and want to be part of our brilliant team of engineers that produced it, then have a look at our latest vacancies here.