10 September 2015
Are the French really out to lunch?
Or are the English several sandwiches short of a decent ‘picnique’?
by Richard Pooley
“Oh la vache!”* exclaimed Alain. He’s an ex-rugby player and keen supporter of our local Top 14 club, Brive – but when told last weekend that the next home match would be at 12.30 on Sunday, he wondered whether he could go. He could not believe that anyone would be so stupid as to schedule a match in the middle of Sunday lunch. Certainly the two Frenchmen who sit next to me in the stadium will be absent. They offered me their season tickets so that my wife and son can join me. Perhaps we will be the only supporters there. But then we are British.
The French take lunch very seriously indeed. A few years ago I was at an all-day meeting between my British company and managers from Air France and KLM. We were at Schiphol Airport; so the Dutch were our hosts. At 12.00 the door opened and a trolley piled high with sandwiches was wheeled in. We were told that we could take a half-hour break for lunch. The French could not hide their dismay at such barbarity. Many left their sandwiches untouched and collected around the coffee machine, muttering about the shortcomings of Dutch culture. My company has also run courses for Renault at their Paris headquarters for the past 15 years. The only regular criticisms have been about the quality of the wine served at lunch in the company restaurant and the shortness of the lunch period, a mere hour.
Last year we and some two hundred other people sat down to a barbecue lunch of wild boar at 12.30 and got up to leave at 18.30. Okay this was on a Sunday in rural France; but it is still normal during the week, even in big companies in the cities, for employees to spend well over an hour having lunch and coffee with colleagues. Many still go home for lunch if they don’t live too far away from their workplace. My French accountant works in Brive. Her husband works for a defence equipment manufacturer in Tulle, 26 km away. They live in a village 9 km north-east of Brive. Twice a week they meet at home for lunch. There is little point in shops being open in France at lunchtime. Nearly all of those in our large village, including the supermarket, close between 12.30 and 15.00, Tuesday to Saturday (but open between 7.00 and 8.00 and never close before 19.00).
British and American visitors to our house in France always ask why French workers spend so long having lunch. Surely, they argue, this and the notorious 35-hour week explain why the French economy is barely growing. I gently point out that productivity in France is 13% higher than in the UK and that output per hour is 27% higher. And this is not just recently. On average over the past 20 years French workers have been a fifth more productive than their British counterparts. French productivity is on a par with Germany and only slightly less than the USA. The French economy is indeed in a parlous state but the blame does not lie with the amount of hours that the French work. On the whole they seem to work hard and efficiently. At least they do in the private sector.
It is difficult to get the French to explain why they have long lunch hours. They have always had them from the moment they first went to school (and came back home for lunch every day).
As someone who often worked through the lunch hour in my London office, a supermarket sandwich by my side, I have found the French attitude immensely appealing. And sensible. What better way of networking than doing so over lunch with colleagues? Why go on team-building courses when you can sit down to lunch every day with those you work with and exchange ideas, discuss politics (office as well as national) and gossip? If you want afternoon meetings to be productive, why not hold them after everyone has had a simple but delicious lunch and has had a further hour for their food to be digested? There is a good reason why the hour or so after lunch is known as the “graveyard slot” by conference speakers, business presenters and trainers. Why try to work through it? Better surely to spend that time reading, chatting or even sleeping. Findings of research presented at the European Society of Cardiology annual conference in London last week showed that having a nap in the middle of the day lowered blood pressure. So perhaps we should be looking more closely at the old Spanish model, which not only included a leisurely lunch, but also the siesta.
One French client I have worked with for many years has its head office in western Paris. It’s one of France’s largest international companies. It is always a pleasure to have lunch in their excellent staff restaurant. It’s not just the food; it’s the quality of conversation too. I have learned more about the company, its culture and its politics in those long lunch breaks than in all the official meetings I have had with its staff. And, of course, those same people have taken decisions about what business to do with me and my company during those lunchtimes too.
Human Resources managers and business gurus talk a lot about the need for workers to find the right work-life balance. Maybe those who come from what the French derisively call “Anglo-Saxon” cultures should be a little less dismissive of the French view of what that balance should be.
*This does not mean as www.freetranslation.com would have you believe, “Oh, the cow!” but “Oh damn!” or even “You’re joking.”
