When entrepreneur Jennifer Walsh needs to meet up with an employee or fellow business owner, she heads to Central Park.
“It’s very free-flowing,” says the 45-year-old Upper East Side resident. “Ideas just come from walking.”
After years of holing up in boardrooms and coffee shops, Walsh now takes her meetings on her feet — a move favored by President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and countless Aaron Sorkin TV-show characters.
Long believed to be a productivity hack, walking meetings can also boost creativity and help white-collar workers get much-needed exercise, recent research shows.
It’s very free-flowing. Ideas just come from walking.
- Jennifer Walsh on walking meetings
A small study from the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, published in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease in June, found that changing one traditional meeting each week to a walking meeting increases employees’ physical activity levels by 10 minutes. (The Department of Health and Human Services recommends 150 minutes of exercise per week.)
Plus, as principal investigator Alberto Caban-Martinez tells The Post, the subjects in the study reported “improved mood for that day . . . and productivity was high.” Turning a work meeting into exercise, he says, is “such easy, low-hanging fruit.”
Walking meetings can seem inconvenient at first. It’s hard to follow a schedule or take diligent notes — especially if you’re dodging tourists on crowded city streets.
But for Dan Roth, the New York-based executive editor of LinkedIn, that’s exactly the point. “What I really love is that you don’t have a phone with you, or a computer with you,” the 43-year-old Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, resident says. “You can get deep into a conversation and get focused.”
He first encountered walking meetings in 2011 while at his company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., where workers trek along paths designed to last long enough for a 15- or 30-minute conference.
When Roth returned to Manhattan, he kept the meetings going — albeit with an East Coast twist. “The New York variant is, ‘Let’s go walk somewhere we can get coffee and walk back,’ ” he says. He’s found that walking meetings are best for one-on-one chats, particularly when he’s holding weekly check-ins with each of his employees.
For both Walsh and Roth, the benefits are more mental than physical. “I do not do walking meetings for the health benefits,” Roth says. “I do it for the productivity.”
A 2014 study out of Stanford University found that walking had a significant, positive effect on creativity.
Walsh likes the way walking meetings nix the stiffness of a traditional meeting. “When you’re sitting in a meeting, one person leads, and then the other person has to interject,” she says. “In a walking meeting, it’s more like a brain dump. It’s just a constant flow.”
You can get deep into a conversation and get focused.
- Dan Roth on the benefits of walking meetings
She likes walking meetings so much, she decided to start filming on-the-go chats for a new video series, “Walk With Walsh” — an idea she says came to her while walking. She interviews businesspeople she admires while they walk, which, she says, helps her subjects open up faster and get deeper in their answers.
Just don’t get too deep into conversation — “You have to pay attention to street life,” cautions Roth. “You’re walking, walking, and then, whoa — you’re in the middle of an intersection.”
Safety first, everyone.