How building bridges over lunch became easy

Asana Rebel is a successful digital yoga and wellness company. It started as an e-commerce platform for the yoga community. After Series A and B financing rounds they took their reach and expertise further to serve the needs of health conscious men and women needs around mindfulness, nutrition, and body exercises with mobile apps, that have been downloaded 10 million times.

When I joined the team at Asana Rebel in the HR function we had a very collaborative environment across our members. As we grew to 30+ employees the challenge became how to keep and scale the welcoming and collaborative team environment as we continued to grow with 3 new hires per month.

Connecting our team members over lunch with new and old colleagues across all teams was an idea that we implemented early on. We had started to run our lunch-roulettes by physical drawing, at our bi-weekly All-hands meetings. But with a larger team, this process blew up, and became too time consuming to do this live. Also the analog process lacked smartness in matching people up with recurring groupings.

To continue our lunch-roulette practice it was necessary to automate the lottery process.

With Wellbeing Warrior our HR team was able to manage our lunch-roulette practice without keeping extra lists of who’s in or out or new or old to the team only for this purpose. The automated integration of new company email accounts made this work perfectly.

We were able to match team members into groups every two weeks and not have to worry about sending invitation messages and reminding notifications about their lunch-dates. We set our team member lunch roulette to take place every other week, and Wellbeing Warrior sent automated notifications and guidelines to support our team members to get connected with their known and less known colleagues.

Using Wellbeing Warrior for our lunch-roulette also insured smartness in the matching, which became important to us later too. We thought it was okay that close team members could be matched together once in a while, yet a goal of the roulette is to keep the mixes in the groups high. Based on the matching history and people’s roles we ensured that new bridges were built during the roulette.

This way we succeed to keep the lunch roulette process easy for ourselves, but most importantly to our team members.

The lunch-roulette format is thus loved by our employees and valued highly for meeting and engaging informally with other colleagues.

It is important that members can opt in and out easily to their availability. As the administrator you don’t want to be the one manually checking who’s opting in and out to prepare the lunch-roulette. Let members decide for themselves, at the end no one should be forced to take part. A collaborative, welcoming team culture supports adoption of the lunch-roulette. And vice versa the lunch roulette helps to instill exactly that edge in your team members.