I've always valued a midday walk in fresh air, away from my desk. I'm happy to do it with co-workers.
At the two places I've worked that offered the free lunch, there was a lot of pressure to stay in the office for the lunch, both implicit and explicit. I felt the free lunch offer was not so much a boon to my productivity but as an encroachment on my personal time.
Perhaps only coincidentally, I felt those two companies also had many problems understanding their engineering and creative employees and their needs, probably familiar to a lot of HN folks: flexible working hours, office layout, transparency, etc.
Our company has been in hot water for not properly compensating employees during our "free lunch / trainings" that we hold every so often. Yes, you're giving them free food, no they don't get a choice and yes that's illegal. Pay up, clueless managers.
I was new at a company that did this. We had to submit weekly timesheets. No one told me the procedure but I figured, everyone attended so I figured marking down 30 minutes (out of 60) on the time on the timesheet billed to the company was a fair deal.
A few days later a company-wide email was sent out specifying that these trainings were optional and not to be billed to the company.
Ah, what a joke. I recall someone not putting it on their timesheet and instead going directly to the Department of Labor. Good on them, I say. I've got a vested interested in the company doing well, but that was a ridiculous policy.
That's not all places though -- I've worked at a company with free lunch that was awesome about it. Eat there if you want; if you don't like the food that day or just felt like not eating there then go eat somewhere else. In fact, my work friends and I started doing weekly outside lunches just to get a little more variety and to see some of the restaurants we'd stopped going to when catered lunch began (first world problems...)
I had the CTO of a startup reach out to me multiple times over the course of a year. It was in a similar space to the company I was at at that time. When I came by, the office was basically a large open room with what amounted to something like long picnic tables for desks (their version of open office) that resembled a call center. The CTO then mentioned that teams take their lunches together. I was there during the lunch time, there was little chatter, banter, or any non-work interaction.
That was the last discussion with that company.
I like that google has multiple locations for lunch and employees roam and get out of their buildings (been invited many times). Where I am, we have a catered lunch, generally do it as a team, but I am not in every day...and caterers get lazy over time. So, lunch w/ the team every couple of days is ok. When I am at home, lunch is about getting outside and getting a ride or a surf session in. A small meal and exercise is much better for me than sitting around and chit chatting.
At the two places I've worked that offered the free lunch, there was a lot of pressure to stay in the office for the lunch, both implicit and explicit. I felt the free lunch offer was not so much a boon to my productivity but as an encroachment on my personal time.
Perhaps only coincidentally, I felt those two companies also had many problems understanding their engineering and creative employees and their needs, probably familiar to a lot of HN folks: flexible working hours, office layout, transparency, etc.