Losing Our Lunch Frenzied Workers Using Lunch Breaks For Everything Beside Relaxing And Eating

Donna Leigh, a systems manager for the Defense Department, spends at least 12 hours a day commuting and working at her job in Fairfax County, Va. She’d love to take a break when her lunch hour arrives, but to spend those 60 minutes eating at a restaurant would be to squander precious time, Leigh says.

Instead, she often drives to a nearby supermarket to pick up groceries or to the post office to mail packages. Sometimes she shops for clothes or fits in a doctor’s appointment. Sometimes she stays at the office to attend a staff meeting.

As for lunch, she snacks at her desk later in the afternoon.

For Leigh, there’s nothing remotely relaxing about the lunch hour. “It just feels like it’s an extension of the day, to be honest,” she said.

It feels that way to more and more employees across the country. The practice of occasionally skipping one’s lunch break to take care of pressing business is hardly new. But now many office workers make that sacrifice day in and day out, and the range of lunch-hour activities keeps growing.

Longer daily commutes, along with the family responsibilities that working parents face when they get home, have shrunk the time available in the evening for personal errands, so more workers are using the lunch hour to get those errands accomplished.

At the same time, companies bent on improving productivity increasingly are scheduling lunch-hour office meetings and seminars, leaving their employees with no choice but to forgo a midday break.

The lunch hour isn’t even an hour anymore. A recent nationwide survey found that office workers on average take only 36 minutes for lunch. More than half of the workers surveyed said they engage in other activities besides eating - such as shopping, exercising or catching up on work - during their lunch breaks.

“It appears that lunch time is becoming a catchall for taking care of personal business as well as work-related activities,” said Rick Mohr, a spokesman for Steelcase Inc., an office-furniture manufacturer that commissioned the survey as part of its ongoing study of workplace trends. “The traditional sit-down, ‘relax with your co-workers for an hour’ time is basically gone.”

Women, in particular, are avoiding such lunches. The Steelcase survey found that men on average take 10 percent longer for lunch than women. Women are twice as likely as men to go shopping on their lunch breaks; men are more likely to take clients to lunch.

Carolyn Brumbaugh, 45, a defense industry worker from Annandale, Va., said she routinely eats at her desk and uses most of her lunch break to shop for groceries and clothes - tasks that she has trouble squeezing into evenings and weekends, when she’s busy chauffeuring her two children to music lessons and gymnastics practice.

Some workers are using their lunch breaks for hobbies and projects that they otherwise wouldn’t have time to pursue. An architect attends a noon Mass; a lawyer tutors elementary-school students; an art museum conservator visits her two sons for lunch at their day-care center.

Some management specialists say it’s troubling that so many workers are maintaining a harried pace through lunch. As it is, they note, office workers generally are working longer hours than in previous decades, and fax machines, beepers and cellular phones tie them to the workplace even when they’re off-duty.

“It’s really important to clear one’s head, and that often requires a change of venue,” said David Schnall, a professor of management at Yeshiva University in New York City.

Schnall said a frenzied lunch hour does not hurt just workers. “It’s also bad for the corporation or organization” when employees don’t get a chance to rejuvenate themselves before a long afternoon or evening at the office, he said.