Increase serendipitous connections with Lunch Roulette

lunch at the officeIn large organisations it is often difficult to know what your colleagues are working on, and as a consequence the sharing of knowledge is limited because people are unaware both of what expertise is out there, and how our own expertise can be applied elsewhere.

This is a key aim of many internal social tools that offer to break down functional silos and allow valuable connections to be made across the organisation.  These tools do however require employees to take the iniative and make the connection.

A new tool aims to force the issue by directly pairing two people up for a lunch date.  The tool is called Lunch Roulette, and it works in much the same way as the notorious Chat Roulette, albeit you hopefully won’t be introduced to men in various stages of undress.

The tool is pretty straightforward to use.  You select a date(s) when you’re free for lunch.  You then select one of the locations you’d be happy to travel to, and then click the match me button.  The system will then match you with the other person, sending both of you calendar reminders.

After that it’s down to you to go on your lunch date and see what the new connection will do for you.  Thus far I think the application is more promise than anything else.  The homepage is very sparse indeed so doesn’t provide any indication of the areas that are covered, so despite entering London I’m none the wiser if the service is even offered in the UK, much less if I will be matched with anyone (none thus far after three days).

Nevertheless, if the service was used by many within a large organisation it would be an excellent way for people to make wider connections.  Having an enterprise version of the tool would be a fantastic addition to any attempts at becoming a social business, and would be ideal for onboarding new employees as well as providing experienced heads with a new way of meeting people across the enterprise.

At the moment though it’s simply not possible to judge if that is on the horizon, so this is one to file in the ‘one to watch’ pile.

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3 thoughts on “Increase serendipitous connections with Lunch Roulette

  1. That actually sounds like a really cool idea and certainly something I can see working in my organization. We've tried similar kinds of thing in the past but without such neat software underpinning it.

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