This is complete bullshit. I worked in an office for many years. The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team" or even anyone in our so-called People team was precisely zero. They would keep to themselves at lunch, and reach out to Engineering only with tickets, or when they needed help with something computer-related.

Engineers have a reputation for being loners, but marketing, sales, and other "soft skills" or "people oriented" functions are super cliquey as well and rarely contribute to this supposed "knowledge transfer" that higher-ups keep talking about. I did notice that this cliquishness gets better at their level; the VP of Sales and the VP of Engineering did have lunch a lot. But expecting it to translate to the lower ranks is naive or fake.

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If any actual leaders who have already mandated in-office time and happen to be reading this, see what happens if you mandate that everyone in the non-tech parts of your org is required to have lunch with the tech people every single day of in-office work.

dTrack this as a metric and be honest with yourself whether it's going up; and most importantly whether that is actually helping the company.