Breakfasts with Colleagues

By Bernadett Kovács, Marketing & PR, and originally published on Medium

Occasions to eat more…oops… to spend more time together 🙂

Organizing company breakfasts at DoctuSoft is a long-standing tradition and has just about everything we love: delicious food, great coffee, and of course each other, just the way we are.

But what’s best is that it’s not a forced management action. We came up with the idea because we wanted it to work.

Eating in company ‒ whether we are talking about family, friends, or colleagues ‒ satisfies two of our basic needs at the same time: food and social relationships. On a business level, the opportunity for informal chit-chat increases productivity. This is an important factor regarding the office design, where to put the coffee machine, etc.

At DoctuSoft we do this on an unconscious level. We just feel it. If we feel that we need more time together, it is 100 percent certain that someone will come up with a great, sometimes crazy idea to realize this. The idea of having breakfast together also came from our colleagues at a time when we needed a cultural renewal.

Imagine these culinary events at DoctuSoft

  • People can apply to host a breakfast. They are responsible for the food part of the event. The food is prepared by us; we are doing it with heart and soul and really want to impress each other with our cooking. This is amazing because 90 percent of our team are boys!
  • Internal Communications — a role dedicated to corporate culture and communications within the company — helps to organize the event: sending out invitations, determining the budget, and keeping everything in mind. It is very important to have someone responsible for the structure and for the organization.
  • We get together at a regular time (now it is the last Thursday of the month) to devour the food and start the day in a cheerful mood.

Don’t be afraid to change the structure

Regular events can get tired. This isn’t a catastrophe. It has happened to us as well. At the beginning we organized the breakfasts biweekly, but from the second half of 2014 we found that it was hard to recruit hosts for the events. At the same time the need for this social activity lessened due to various other corporate programs.

After our regular quarterly satisfaction survey, we decided to have one breakfast a month and from 2015 we added a friendly competition to the series where we are looking for Mr/Ms Breakfast.

Time has proven us right. After 33 breakfasts together, we are still not bored with each other’s culinary talents.