I have long struggled with property management professionals who say, “You know, I never take a lunch. I usually work right through it.” I just don’t get that. I agree that offices are crazy busy and it is sometimes difficult to fit it in and in the same respect I just don’t get it.
In the near fourteen years I have been in the multifamily business and from the time I was a leasing consultant right up to the time I became a regional manager for a major multifamily REIT, I always took a lunch. If for nothing else, it was a time to decompress and regain composure. I felt more productive and more mentally astute in the afternoon if I stocked my body with the proper energy. *Note – never eat Mexican food for lunch, it is a natural nap producer.
Are you a lunch-skipper or do you take the time off to recharge? If you skip, I would love to know your reasons. Let’s hear from those of you who take the time off too.
Additional reading on the topic [Vanishing Lunch Hour]
P.S. Eat your lunch off site today…it will be good for you.
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I am a computer / engineering professional and know of several people who tell me they are so busy they don’t take lunch. I think these people divide into two groups: the guys who are genuinely so busy they literally cannot find the time (minority) and the guys who like to appear busy by constantly talking about their hectic work schedules including their inability to get grub. Having been a project maanger dealing with many different types of employees I have also come to the realization that time is in fact a very ‘stretchy’ commodity. It is amazing how much work certain people can pack into a part time schedule when they are focused and *energized* as opposed to people who routinely spend 12 hours at the office barely achieving the same performance. It really comes down to a positive attitude, being organized and of course taking breaks to re-energize. The sad thing is that our American and global work culture increasingly derides the value of time off which as you put it so well is vital to regaining composure and perspective.
It seems that there is always a steady stream of phone calls and office visits between 11:00-1:00pm. It’s like the Tenants don’t care about our lunch hour, they have things they need to take care of on their lunch hour. And in the mind of the Tenant, they reign supreme and top priority. Tenants can be so demanding that I’d just rather get them out of my hair and on their way than have them keep calling me non-stop until they reach me. Before I know, I’ve worked thru the lunch hour. I know it’s not right, and yes we should take a lunch hour for health reasons (both mental and physical!), but it seems like it never happens.
If you review the data from the major ILS’s it clearly shows that the busiest time for leads (both phone and email) are during the lunch hours. This is when our clients are able to contact us – on their free time. Yet, it’s so vital that our teams be able to decompress, get away from the office and revive themselves that there are only a few solutions out there.
1. Use a call center for your phone and email responses during the times when you are lightly staffed.
2. Stagger your staffing hours. Why can’t some of your staff start at 10 or 11? Our residents want our offices to be open when they come home and our typical office hours don’t permit that.
3. Set specific lunch hours and stick to them, making sure you have one person coverage at all times.
Truly, this depends upon the size of your property and the demands of your residents and prospect and will need to be evaluated (typically) on a site by site basis.
But Mike’s right; we need to take our lunches.
LT,
Thank you for taking the time to give some feedback on this post, it truly means a lot.
M
I will admit to it… when I was working on site, I used to clock out for my lunch break but stay in the office and work through it. Some days, that was the only way to get everything on my desk completed by the end of the day. I was under the impression that everything had to be done right away and did not realize that the “back burner” wasn’t for “suckers”.
I look back on that and instantly think, “wow… that was quite a rookie mistake and I didn’t think that one through,” but then I look at it more in depth and discover that I’m doing the same thing still to this day, I just don’t have to clock in and clock out anymore. I’m a routine offender of working through my lunch hour! Lock me up… or at least out of my office for one hour a day!
Decompression is NOT overrated. We have to step away from our desks once and a while and we have to take a lunch break. If we don’t, we’ll do something odd like lose our patience with a resident or co-worker.
I would be interested to see statistics on offices that have a mandatory hour they shut down for lunch and see what the correlation between that hour of downtime and the rate of turnover in employment is. I’d wager dollars to doughnuts that it’s a BIG ONE.
This is a huge thing for me. My company “requires” that we take a lunch, but it’s really just because they don’t want to pay overtime. I PREFER to not take a lunch for a few reasons. One, because there’s ALWAYS something to do in the office, and the lunch hour is always slammed. Two, because I actually hate taking lunch unless I really have something I need to do (ie: take dry cleaning, or my mother wants to have lunch with me, or I need to go to the bank.) — In errands cases, I’m only gone for 20-30 minutes. I just can’t go sit somewhere and eat. I can’t entertain myself at Walmart for an hour. I don’t want to go home, beacuse all I’ll want to do is go to sleep, and the prospect of going BACK to work once I’ve already been there today, sucks.
So no, I don’t like taking lunches. But, when I do… it ends up being around 3-4pm because of how busy we are.