Everybody organises lunches. Team lunches, client lunches, welcome-the-new-hire lunches. And almost everybody quietly hates the organising part — because it’s real work that doesn’t look like work.
The numbers
Doodle’s State of Meetings research found that a professional who arranges six meetings a week spends about three hours a week just organising them — 156 hours a year of polls, threads and “does Thursday work?” Their 2019 report put the cost of poorly organised meetings at $399 billion per year in the US alone. A single meeting takes around half an hour to coordinate by hand before anyone has exchanged a useful word.
That’s the visible cost. The invisible one is worse: when organising is painful, people stop organising. The cross-team lunch doesn’t happen. The cancelled meeting becomes a sad desk salad instead of a spontaneous catch-up. The client goes another quarter without seeing a human face.
Disconnection is expensive
Gallup’s data shows only about three in ten employees strongly agree they have a best friend at work — and that moving that number to six in ten links to 10% higher profits, 28% fewer safety incidents and customers who are more engaged. Cornell’s firehouse study found teams that eat together cooperate about twice as much as teams that don’t.
In other words: the lunch your team didn’t organise wasn’t free. It cost cohesion, retention and performance — you just never got the invoice.
The fix is not “try harder”
Telling people to network more adds a task. Removing the workload removes the excuse. That’s the design principle behind Circleup: availability shared safely, one tap to agree time and place, an AI agent that calls the restaurant, calendars synced automatically, and reminders when a relationship is due.
The mental load disappears. The lunches start happening. The compounding starts.
Want to know where your organisation stands? Get our free Employee Connection & Productivity Audit — a 10-question tool for HR leaders.