Anders Wenngren

Some companies go to extraordinary lengths to build bonds among workers. At disk-drive maker Seagate Technology, for example, former CEO Bill Watkins used to take groups of 200 employees on a 40-kilometer adventure race through the middle of New Zealand. Fortune’s Jeffrey O’Brien described Seagate’s “Eco week” as a pep rally that existed not as a reward but as an attempt at extreme team building. Watkins, O’Brien wrote, “thinks Eco week…helps build a more collaborative, team-oriented company.”

Most efforts at team building are considerably more mundane. Many corporations plan outings that include such things as ropes courses, trust falls, and game playing. Even those consume time, attention, and money. Worse yet, many participants find them to have no value; trust falls have become a frequently mocked, Dilbertesque symbol of managers’ wrongheaded attempts to create intimacy among employees.

Everyone understandably wants to build higher-performing, more cohesive teams, but there has to be a better way to do it. And now it seems there is. Researchers led by Kevin Kniffin, of Cornell University, say they’ve found a deceptively simple method: Encourage teams to eat together.

Some might regard preparing and eating food together—academics call it “commensality”—as too mundane to merit research or management interest. But Kniffin and his colleagues point out that eating is such a primal behavior that it can be extraordinarily meaningful, even if most of us do it three (or more) times a day.

In one study, the researchers asked people to imagine how jealous they or their best friend would be if a romantic partner engaged in a range of everyday activities with a former partner. The idea of a partner’s eating a midday meal with an ex elicited far more jealousy than the thought of the two engaging in e-mail or phone conversations or, tellingly, having face-to-face interactions that don’t involve eating.

That result shows that there’s a special kind of intimacy involved in sharing a meal. But what does it mean for team building?

In their latest paper, Kniffin and his colleagues focused on firefighters who prepare and eat meals together during their shifts. The communal firehouse dinner is a tradition that has spawned a near mythology (along with a raft of firehouse-themed cookbooks). The researchers wondered: Do firefighters who eat together do their jobs better than those who don’t?

“Eating is such a primal behavior that it can be extraordinarily meaningful.”

Kniffin visited 13 firehouses in a midsize American city and later surveyed the 395 officers of the firefighting force. Although the city provides kitchen and dining areas inside its firehouses, it does not supply any food, so the firefighters pool their funds, work out cooking schedules and menus, and prepare the food themselves. Participating is not required, but in many firehouses the social norm is to do so. In fact, some married firefighters eat at home and then eat a second meal at the firehouse. One vegetarian firefighter brings his own food to prepare at work so that he can eat meals alongside his teammates.

“Cooking Lines Up With the Way We Work” Mira Anderson, a lead recruiter at the Chicago-based online lender Enova, belongs to a team of 25 employees that gained several members after a departmental merger. To help new colleagues get to know one another, she organized an afternoon off-site at a culinary school. HBR spoke with Anderson recently about the experience. Why did you choose a cooking event?

Our company regularly holds team-building activities. We try to be creative with them—my team has done a pub crawl and taken a trapeze class. We’ve found that events involving a casual environment and food build the best camaraderie and get people to open up. The cooking event brought everyone together to create something—it really encouraged collaboration. And there’s something fundamental about sitting together over a meal. I’d say it was the best event we’ve done. A lot of team-building activities—ropes courses, for instance—reward athleticism. Is that a problem?

Exactly. The trapeze event was fun, but it wasn’t a level playing field, and it was more of an independent activity. Cooking lines up better with the way we work. Everybody could do it. I actually don’t cook very much or very well, but another employee—someone new to our team—is really comfortable in the kitchen. It was an opportunity for her to step up and lead. That’s translated well back in the office; she’s shown increased comfort with speaking up. Aren’t food allergies and dietary restrictions an issue?

They weren’t in our case. I had the biggest issue—I’m a vegetarian—but we were able to work with our vendor on a suitable menu. And the way the kitchen is set up, we could have prepared multiple dishes to suit different diets. What did you cook?

Mushroom risotto, a salad, and pastries. It was delicious. A chef held our hands throughout the process. It would have taken real effort for us to mess it up.

The firefighters reported that eating together is a central component of keeping their teams operating effectively. It makes a team feel like a family, they said, and creates a focus when members aren’t out on the job.

When subsequently surveying the fire department’s officers, Kniffin found support for the firefighters’ instincts. The officers identified significant positive correlations between eating together and team performance. Cooperative behavior, for example, was considerably greater—about twice as high—among team members who ate with one another than among those who didn’t. Kniffin and his colleagues argue that the cooperative behaviors underlying the firefighters’ meal practices—collecting money, planning, talking, cleaning, and, of course, eating—all enhance group performance on the job. They write: “Behavior that might seem superfluous or wasteful to outside observers ultimately carries significant importance for organizational performance.”

Companies would do well to think carefully about investing in and facilitating where, when, and how employees eat at work. Although many large employers provide on-site cafeterias (often serviced by outside catering companies), others, such as Google, famously go much further, offering free, high-quality, abundantly varied meals. By using free food to entice employees to stay on campus, such companies not only increase productivity (because workers aren’t spending time in transit); they also increase the odds that coworkers will eat with one another.

Even companies that don’t have a cafeteria or management support for daily subsidized food can take advantage of the research findings. Team leaders can spring for takeout food in a conference room or organize a walk to a nearby lunch place. Another way to leverage the findings: When planning your next offsite, ditch the trust falls and have team members cook an elaborate meal together instead.

But be careful not to overdo it, the researchers caution. Communal eating can have downsides. The first and most damaging is insularity. Team members who socialize only with one another risk becoming disconnected from the rest of the organization or from the outside world. Second, new members may feel overly pressured to conform; tightly bonded teams can be scary things to join. And third, teams may use cliquish meal practices (think of a high school cafeteria) to ostracize and “manage out” low performers—a phenomenon Kniffin observed among the firefighters.

In the end, however, for many teams the potential advantages of sharing meals exceed any disadvantages. Architects and office designers like to talk about the importance of spaces that promote serendipitous encounters (or “collisions”) among employees, which enhance collaboration. (One frequently cited example is Steve Jobs’s desire that the only bathrooms at Pixar’s new headquarters be located in the central atrium, so that workers from different parts of the building couldn’t help but mingle.) Although serendipity plays a role in collaboration, devoting space, time, and resources to communal eating may be more effective.