That free lunch your boss is offering might just be a way to get you back into the office
The free lunch is popular and has encouraged more workers to return to the office.
Sendbird's chief of staff told BI she hopes to see people "organically" come in five days a week.
On Fridays, employees at Sendbird's headquarters are treated to a free lunch — one of the perks of showing up in person.
Yeji Yoon, the company's chief of staff, told Business Insider that the company's chief financial officer started the office tradition for "selfish" reasons: He loves bahn mi sandwiches, particularly those from a local Vietnamese spot.
Fridays aren't official in-person days. Since early 2024, the company has required those who can come into its San Mateo headquarters to be on-site Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It's also rolling out return-to-office mandates at its other offices around the world.
But then a few of the company's teams, including the finance team, decided to come on Fridays, too, because it was easier to collaborate.
"Our CFO would start going around asking anyone else in the office, do you want a sandwich?" Yoon said. "It just became this regular thing, so it grew extremely organically."
Now, there's a Slack channel dedicated to Friday office lunch. Bahn mi orders are entered onto a Google Sheet, and everyone who participates has to submit their orders by 11 a.m.
For "fun," one of the company's performance marketing managers started looking at the data: total orders over time, the most popular customization — no peppers, more cilantro — and how orders vary depending on the number of people on vacation.
The conclusion is that "food is definitely a way to keep people or bring people in the office," Yoon said.
While academics, sociologists, and working parents have all lauded the benefits of remote work, Yoon said it's just not practical anymore, especially with the new changes in AI.
Remote roles are best when "there's no real dependency on collaboration or iterations or real-time decision-making that needs to happen," she said. "Now, especially with AI, where everything is changing so quickly, product is changing so quickly, customers' expectations are changing really quickly — nobody really knows how fast everything is changing. They don't really understand it. There's a lot of collaboration that has to happen on the go."
The pace of work and the company's product releases slow down when workers are remote, she said. And while there are no plans to force employees to come into the office on Fridays, the free bahm mi might be all they need to make it happen.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Spear AI raises first round of funding to apply AI to submarine data
By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -A startup founded by U.S. Navy veterans aiming to help the U.S. military use artificial intelligence to decipher data gathered by submarines has raised its first round of outside capital. Washington-based Spear AI specializes in working with what is known as passive acoustic data, which is gathered by listening devices underwater. Its long-term aim is to use AI to help submarine operators understand whether an object heard could be a rain squall, a whale, or a vessel that could be a threat, and to detect where it is and how fast it is moving. The challenge is that most existing AI tools are trained on data such as words or images that have been painstakingly labeled and organized over years or decades by companies such as Scale AI, which recently signed a $14.8-billion deal with Meta Platforms. Data from acoustic sensors is different. Spear AI co-founders Michael Hunter, a former U.S. Navy SEAL analyst, and John McGunnigle, a former nuclear submarine commander for the U.S. Navy, are building a hardware and software platform that aims to prepare that data for AI algorithms. The company sells sensors that can be attached to buoys or vessels and a software tool to help label and sort the data gathered by the sensors to make it ready to be put into AI systems. The U.S. Navy this month awarded Spear AI a $6-million contract for its data-labeling tool. Spear AI, founded in 2021, has been self-funded and has about 40 employees. Hunter, the CEO, said it raised $2.3 million from AI-focused venture firm Cortical Ventures and private equity firm Scare the Bear. The funding will be used to double the company's headcount to support its government contracts and commercial business prospects, such as monitoring underwater pipelines and cables. Hunter said Spear AI also aims to sell consulting services, a model similar to defense tech firm Palantir. "We wanted to build the product and actually get it out the door before the contract came in to get it," Hunter told Reuters. "The only way you can do that is with private capital." Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Nvidia Reaches New Peak as Google Lifts Cloud Spending Forecast
July 25 - Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) hit a fresh intraday high Friday, edging up 0.5% to $174.53 in early trading, on track to close at a record if it holds. The GPU pioneer gained momentum after a 1.7% pop Thursday, as investors brace for a wave of tech earnings next week. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Signs with NVDA. Wall Street sees Nvidia chips as the go?to for AI model training, and expectations remain lofty. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) underlined that demand by lifting its 2025 capital?expenditure forecast by 13% to $85 billion, signaling more server and data?center builds, including Nvidia's gear. While Google touts its custom TPUs, it still backs GPUs to meet broader cloud needs. Ben Reitzes of Melius Research states that Google Cloud is currently capacity constrained but anticipates subsequent growth in the second half because Google can deploy more capacity. Such a dynamic would fuel a long-term market of Nvidia sales and other conglomerates, such as AMD (NASDAQ:AMD), which would be able to sustain an AI-fueled GPU demand. As significant Nvidia reports are still ahead, its stocks might remain unstable, but the boom in AI infrastructure does not appear to have reached its limit. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Sign in to access your portfolio


Bloomberg
19 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
US and China Compete for AI Lead
General Catalyst Institute Founding President Teresa Carlson discusses how the US AI Action Plan can help startups as well as large companies compete globally. She joins Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech." (Source: Bloomberg)