What Firefighters Can Teach Us About Team Building

Walk into just about any firehouse across America and you’ll see firefighters at the ready. They are fully-trained with vehicles glistening; essentially a team of specialists ready to respond at a moment’s notice. But you’d be surprised at what else you might find: big tough guys, outfitted in aprons and wielding oven mitts, not axes. They are perfecting baked ziti and lifting groaning platters of fried pork chops.

Sure, firefighters like to eat. But firehouse crews also have a long tradition of cooking meals together. And there is a good reason for this. They spend long tours together, knowing they will be interrupted by an alarm at any moment. The practical need to keep the whole team close to the fire trucks and the intimacy of cooking and eating together fundamentally intertwine to create deeper social ties that keep the team performing at its best.

In a firehouse, the dining room is the main gathering room where firefighters can monitor alarms, debrief after returning from alarm calls or talk while “on call” for the next fire alarm. Fire department supervisors innately believe that shared meals have a significant impact on organizational performance and they’re right.

Cornell researchers investigated how shared meals among city firefighters built greater collaboration, communication, and team performance. Using interviews and surveys of firefighters and supervisors, they were able to show that firefighters who cooked and ate meals together scored higher on surveys measuring cooperative behavior and work-group performance.

“Eating together is a more intimate act than looking over an Excel spreadsheet together,” said study author Dr. Kevin Kniffin, assistant professor at Cornell University’s School of Applied Economics and Management. “From an evolutionary anthropology perspective, eating together has a long, primal tradition as a kind of social glue. That seems to continue in today’s workplaces.”

Dr. Kniffin should know. When not studying firefighters, he leads research studies of athletic and workplace teams. For the shared meals study, Kniffin and his team interviewed firefighters throughout 50 firehouses in one large city over the course of 15 months. They asked 395 supervisors from the fire departments to rate their firehouse’s performance on a scale of 0 to 10, along with how often they cooked and ate together during a typical four-day workweek.

A clear link emerged from the research results. Firehouse co-workers that cooked and ate together tended to get higher performance ratings, while firehouses that didn’t eat together scored lower.

Workplace Lessons Learned from Firefighters

The research results found “cooking together does correlate positively with cooperative behavior”.  It’s notable that fire department officers reported much more cooperative behavior within units that routinely cook and eat together when compared with those that do not share meals.

At Team Building with Taste, we understand the connection between sharing the experience of cooking and eating together with improved performance. It’s in our DNA. Our goal is to help inspire team cohesiveness and enhance performance, that’s why we get feedback like this from our participants:

“For the first few minutes, we stared at this recipe dumbfounded. None of us knew what to do or where to start. Then, we took the time to talk about it and find out what each of us was good at, and what we liked to do. Before long, we jumped right in and started working as a team. And we ended up winning!”

Learn more about the types of team building cooking activities offered by Team building with Taste in Dallas and Atlanta.