Lunch break policies vary widely across industries and organizations in the United States. If you work in retail, you’ll likely get around 30 minutes and be forced to clock in and out, with penalties if you’re even a minute late. Construction workers may kick back and eat on the job site, while white-collar workers tend to have a bit more freedom.
Entrepreneur Chris Beecham, known on TikTok as Zero Dollar Coach, is getting a lot of love for his adult approach to lunch breaks. Beecham is a business mindset coach and interactive speaker, CEO of Perch and Merch Building, and host of The Unscripted Climb podcast.
Beecham doesn’t care how long you take for a lunch break
In a TikTok video titled “I pay for two hour lunches,” Beecham says he doesn’t care “how long of a lunch my employees take,” adding, “All of my people get paid lunches, and I’m not sitting there with a stopwatch timing it all. Take an hour, take two hours. Your cousin’s in town, and you wanna go have lunch with them? Go. You’ve had a sh*t morning, and you need an extra hour to get your head right so you don’t come back miserable? Take it.”
Beecham believes that if you have good employees who get the job done, they don’t need micromanagement.
“The same person who takes a two-hour lunch on a Friday will come in next week and eat lunch at their desk while they’re working,” he said. “Or they won’t take lunch at all, or they’ll stay late because something needs finished. It balances out.”
Beecham also has a message for business owners who keep track of every minute their employees spend on break.
“Then I hope you’re keeping track of both sides of that clock. Because if somebody takes 31 minutes and you’re pissed off about that extra minute, you better also be keeping track of every time they only took 22 minutes,” he said. “Every time they answered a phone call during lunch, every time they ate at their desk, every time they stayed five minutes late finishing something. You don’t get to count every minute an employee takes from you and completely ignore every minute they give back.”
Many people in the comments loved Beecham’s common-sense approach to management.
“Treat adults like adults, and you get an adult,” Bryan wrote.
“Some business owners think they employ toddlers who need to be told everything, including how they should eat their lunch. It sucks,” Resilience added.
Some thought Beecham’s break policy wouldn’t work in fields like healthcare or in blue-collar jobs where people work on teams.
Lunch breaks aren’t just for eating
According to QuickBooks, the average lunch break in the U.S. is 36 minutes, which doesn’t leave much time for most people to grab a bite at a local restaurant. Depending on the rest of an employee’s schedule, it may be one of the few breaks they get all day. Research shows that more frequent breaks can improve employee productivity, morale, and mental health.
Beecham’s managerial philosophy may not be the perfect solution for every business. But his underlying idea is worth considering for anyone in management: when employees are trusted to do what’s best and treated like adults, that flexibility can pay off in morale, productivity, and loyalty.
