Business lunches: the great lubricator of the economy

Business functions foster trust and lubricate the economy. Picture: iStock

The coronavirus has changed the nature of work. Some jobs – especially in hospitality, aviation, events and the arts – have lost traction, whereas others have emerged in logistics, technology, healthcare and agribusiness. But perhaps the greatest impact on the workplace has been the advent of the social experiment of working from home.

Prior to the pandemic the idea of working from home was regarded by some as code for having a day off. The pandemic changed all that and demonstrated that in some sectors this arrangement could indeed work from a business perspective. And not just in cities hardest hit by the pandemic. The ensuing logic was: if it’s OK for the Melbourne office to work from home, then we should have that option too.

Working from home has required learning new technology and protocols, such as participating in Zoom meetings, navigating the permit system connected with interstate travel and resolving technology issues without always referring to an IT expert. But these are simply the technical challenges. There have been other, more subtle, social changes that may well have longer-term business implications.

In the pre-pandemic world, important business matters such as contracts, deals and heads of agreements would be discussed over lunch. The business lunch started at 12.30pm and ended at 2pm. It was easy to arrange and navigate. Every weekday the CBD of every major city was abuzz with these business, social, relationship-cementing lunches. The same logic applied to the coffee catch-up, which could be done and dusted within an hour. From a city office tower it was one lift down to a cafe, meet, chat and exchange business cards, then back to the workplace. I could do this within a 45-minute window if the attendee was, like me, precisely on time and the cafe service and bill-paying experience was up to scratch.

These social aspects of the workplace have been much diminished by the rise of the #WFH movement. They’re harder to arrange. A series of discussions must take place: where do you live, what’s a convenient halfway point, where do I park, what is the overall time window to be allocated? It’s all too hard!

The more subtle calculation is whether a potential business connection is coffee-catchup-worthy, let alone business-lunch-worthy. A coffee is less of a commitment than lunch. Coffee is for introductions and for floating ideas. If the idea doesn’t appeal, you can extricate yourself within minutes, or so I am told. It’s harder to do that in a business lunch; you can’t dash back to the office mid osso buco.

If it seems a bit personal to ask, “Where do you live?” in order to identify an equitably distanced coffee shop rendezvous, a Coffee Catchup app that calculates by algorithmic wizardry a midway cafe without disclosing suburb information could be useful.

But there is more to this than navigating the logistics and social niceties of catching up. A generation of business lunches and coffee catchups had a purpose other than pure indulgence. If there is no easy pathway to a work/social chitchat situation, I wonder whether there will be a diminution in trust between business parties.

Maybe, by the mid-2020s, we will find that business deals are harder to negotiate without a culture of trust that has been fortified and, for some, lubricated by the long-lost business lunch and its poor precursor cousin, the coffee catchup.