How often do you move around in the day when you are at work? Probably not often enough?
Encouraging fitness in the workplace can be beneficial to yourself and your team. By moving around and getting some exercise your body can release endorphins which can make you feel more energised, confident and release stress.
What do you do as part of your daily routine to stay healthy and incorporate fitness into this?
Have you ever thought about walking meetings?
During my time in the corporate world we tried to come up with innovative ways to make meetings more productive (and fun!) – one of these things was to introduce the “walk and talk” meetings.
By walking and talking you will have more interaction with your meeting partner and you can use this time to get your daily fitness in at the same time!
However, before you decide to organise one of these meetings, there are a few things you will need to take into consideration and I thought it would be good to share some tips with you for the do’s and don'ts to make these successful.
I encourage you to have a go, I will do so myself, as a small business owner, providing mainly virtual business & PA support out of Cheshire I am so excited to learn this concept has also been introduced to SME’s to meet up and mingle. A great new networking initiative has started whereby there is now a networking walk. I can’t wait to join that one!
Walk and talk meetings:
1. Stick to 1:1 - it’s great for catching up with one person, once you have more people it’s hard to walk side by side and have a direct conversation.
2. No surprises – please ensure that this is clearly indicated in the meeting invite / communication, as especially for women, we would want to put on sensible shoes!
3. Know your route – it’s important that you plan where you want to walk to ensure that you are back in time at the (home) office for your next meeting. Knowing where you are going is a must as the last thing you want to be doing is looking around for directions as you will just want to focus on the meeting and don’t want to get lost. Another thing to keep in mind as well, since fitness levels do vary, is to plan a little stop during this meeting for a quick refreshment to catch your breath.
4. Share pre-read in advance – it’s important for walking meetings that information which will be discussed during this meeting is shared in advance so that both people are well prepared and make most efficient use of the time. It cannot be expected to read the material and walk at the same time. Also keep in mind walking meetings are great for brain storming sessions and generating ideas, therefore refrain from discussion topics such as detailed sales figures which often means you need to reference to the data.
5. Practice some mindfulness – silence during walk meetings is useful, it’s good to take in the fresh air and the scenery and at the same time it’s OK for people to have time to think, silences are more natural in the open air.
6. Follow up after the meeting – one thing which is a little more challenging is that these meetings are not as structured and therefore there is no note taking (worse case scenario if you really need to – make a few notes on your smartphone). It’s therefore important that at the end of the meeting you summarise the most important take-aways and before you return to your desk and dive back into your emails and telephone calls, you make a few notes to summarise the action points which you can share later with your meeting partner.
Please leave your comments and ideas as to what works for you to keep moving and staying active as I would love to have your thought on this topic.
