INTERNAL EMPLOYEE NETWORKING
OVER LUNCH & COFFEE

Many organisations are dominated by silo mentality: departments collaborate inefficiently, exchange across teams and hierarchies is lacking and employees aren’t informed about the responsibilities of other divisions. Mystery Lunch connects your employees over lunch and supports the creation of new connections, which ultimately reduces barriers between departments. Colleagues can expand their networks and learn more about the company as a whole. New perspectives are an important basis for innovation.

The company itself decides how many colleagues should meet at a time. The most common set-up is the lunch for two. Some companies offer group lunches for three or four participants.

In most cases, the level of interest shown by employees is far greater than expected. On average, we have found that between 10 and 30 percent of employees in a company will sign up. As part of the roll-out, we also offer advice on how to communicate the programme most effectively. (Here you can view a list of clients whose employees are already benefiting from Mystery Lunch.)

Every employee is free to decide whether they want to expand their network and learn more about other departments. In addition, employees are likely to use the Mystery Lunch to discuss topics they’re genuinely interested in. They still get to decide entirely how they want to spend their lunch break.

Mystery Lunch supports the idea of an open and innovative corporate culture, which includes giving employees sufficient freedom and creative leeway. While there won’t, of course, be monitoring of behaviour or performance, we will provide regular reports on factors including the total number of participants. Furthermore, we’ll support your evaluation of positive changes resulting from the implantation of Mystery Lunch by conducting voluntary surveys.

No. The important part is the idea of networking and getting to know someone new. To achieve this goal, colleagues could also meet for a mystery coffee or a walking meeting; we also offer a solution for virtual exchange between different sites and countries. (Groups from different departments can also meet for a brainstorming session to obtain more perspectives on a problem.)

To date, more than 50 companies have signed up for our platform and a total of more than 10.000 employees have participated in a Mystery Lunch. You can read (in German) about the positive experiences of our clients here and here.

Our smart algorithm matches colleagues from different divisions. To ensure that your employees get to know people from as many new departments as possible, you can define company-specific configurations. Additional variables such as interests, language or hierarchy level can be integrated into the matching algorithm.

The service is billed on a monthly basis based on the number of employees or, alternatively, on the number of active participants. Setting up the platform is usually free of charge. Feel free to contact us for a specific quote.

You can request a trial / pilot for up to 20 participants free of charge. For more information please contact us here.

Your employees simply need an Internet connection, a browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, or any other standard browser) and an email address. We have deliberately kept the registration and participation process as simple and user-friendly as possible.

When you sign up for Mystery Lunch, you gain access to the established and reliable structures of our Mystery Lunch platform. To ensure that the system is configured to suit your standards and needs, we work with you to develop an individual concept. To develop this fully, we require information about your organisational structure and corporate design as well as your feedback about the phrasing of texts on your personalised Mystery Lunch website.

To ensure an optimal roll-out of the platform, we can, if so desired, advise you on the development of marketing and internal communication materials.

Following the setup and initial internal communication, no other specific resources are needed from your side. Your employees can contact our customer service directly in case of questions about the matching process, holidays or changes to their configuration settings.

We handle your data according to state-of-the-art security standards and have implemented the full range of standard data security measures. All data sent to our system is transferred via a secure SSL/TLS 1.2 connection. Our data center is located in Germany and is subject to strict statutory privacy regulations. If you require the security of your data to be contractually guaranteed, we can, upon request, issue a data processing agreement in line with the Federal Data Protection Act.