- AI customer service platform Sendbird caters a Friday lunch for employees who come 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.
