09/ 26/ 2006
Looking for a way to broaden your employees' knowledge without spending a fortune on seminars? Look no further than your conference room. An increasingly popular way to teach your staff new tricks, "lunch and learn" seminars are a low-cost alternative to pricey seminars and training conferences.
A staple at most large corporations, lunch and learns are optional, informal training sessions that usually take around 30 to 45 minutes to complete. The session is generally held on-site (in a conference room, cafeteria or wherever there's room) and can cover any number of topics.
Due to their casual, optional nature, lunch and learns are not the time to conduct required training. Instead, lunch and learns should cover topics suitable for any area of your business and any level of experience.
When planning your lunch and learn, keep in mind that employees don't want to give up their lunch break. So make sure your lunch and learns are appealing enough to make them want to attend. Follow these tips for a successful lunch and learn:
Vary your topics: Lunch and learns can cover virtually any business-appropriate topic, including work skills, new product trainings, professional and personal development. Work-skill lunch and learns might include lessons on how to conduct better client service or reducing errors in your work. You can also use lunch and learns to teach employees how to use a new cost-tracking spreadsheet or how to use the conference phone system. Professional development lunch and learns can introduce your employees in one department to how another department works, teaching them new skill sets along the way. And finally, probably the most flexible topics will fall under the personal development category, ranging from ways to manage stress to mastering the art of small talk to maintaining healthy eating habits during the holidays. No matter what topics you choose, make sure they're varied. Expect low attendance if you conduct four consecutive lunch and learns on sales-oriented topics.
Make announcements early and often: No matter the topic, attendance at your lunch and learns will be higher if you notify your employees well in advance and remind them as the date gets closer. While they're optional, convey to your employees that the lunch and learn is something you'd like for them to attend.
Have an incentive: The most obvious incentive to improve lunch and learn attendance is to provide free lunch. Pizza is an affordable option, as are box lunches from your building's cafeteria or nearby deli. If you are providing food, ask for a head count the day before and order about three more servings of food than you think you'll need. That way last-minute attendees won't go hungry. If serving an entire lunch to your employees is outside of your budget, consider just supplying the beverages and dessert. If you don't want to entice your employees with food, there are myriad other ways to entice employees to arrive, such as door prizes and time off (for example, if you conduct four lunch and learns in a six-month period, and employees get perfect attendance, you can give them an additional half-day vacation).
Keep it short and simple: Serving lunch first and then jumping into the lesson is the best way to get and keep your employees' attention. This also gives you only about 35 to 40 for the actual lesson. Keep your focus on one specific topic (for example, instead of trying to teach the top 10 ways to manage job stress, focus on only a handful) so you can really drive home the point.
If your first lunch and learn is unsuccessful, don't give up. Ask a few employees who attended––and a few who didn't––for feedback and adjust your lunch and learns accordingly.
