Friday Team Lunches
In many cases, the people you work with are the ones you spend more time with than almost anyone else in your life. They often become some of our closest friends, and some are even eventually considered family. At MW, this is something that we feel very strongly about, so we are always doing whatever we can to encourage that higher level of comradery among our team.
One of the ways we do this is our Friday Team Lunches. Every Friday, we get lunch from a locally owned restaurant of a team member’s choosing, we set up a big row of tables and chairs, the shop shuts down, and everyone has lunch together. Despite being inside the shop, on a lunch break with everyone in uniform, the conversations that take place are rarely about work.
Most of the time everyone chats about new and exciting news, weekend plans, trips to go on, project cars they’re working on, something cool they found on Facebook Marketplace or any number of things. Environments like this can be hard to come by in many workplaces where people are conditioned to just show up, put in their hours and go home. Only chatting with coworkers about mundane work-related topics and small talk.
That is not the case around here. We very much function like a family, and it shows. Many of our team members have become good friends and often spend time together outside of work. Whether it’s at the lake in the summer or Big White in the winter, everybody loves to get out together and have a good time.
We take great pride in maintaining a healthy culture at the Werke Shop. We didn’t get this way by accident, either. Building and maintaining a culture such as this is not easy and requires certain investments and sacrifices that do not provide a direct return on investment, but when everyone can come into work happy the results speak for themselves. This not only provides the best results for our customers, but the best possible working experience, and day-to-day life, for our team.
Written by Tyler Schick.