Humans are not designed to spend all their time indoors. And especially we’re not well-designed for spending most of the time sitting down. So it makes sense to get out and about – but how possible is it when there are so many things to do at the keyboard, and so many meetings to attend? We’ve all heard of the concept of walking meetings – but how practical are they?
According to Martine de Vaan, they are not only essential for the health and wellbeing of the modern worker, but also can improve the quality and effectiveness of meetings. As such they are an essential if undervalued productivity tool.
Martine has written a book (currently available in Dutch) with the title Walk Your Meeting. And there is much more to it than going outside for a chat or a lunchtime walk, as Martine told Philip Vanhoutte at our January meeting of the European Smart Work Network.
Key takeaways include:
- It’s important to have a structured approach
- Martine has coined a new term – Weetings (=Walking meetings)
- You can plan different routes for different kinds of meetings, and specify different points of the journey by which you should have specified your goals, whether you are on track to meet the purposes of the meeting, and when to summarise and make notes
- Yes, you can make notes in various ways during a meeting! Martine explains how in the video
- There’s an app too for capturing great ideas on the fly – its name is Spot. Just tell it to “fetch” and it will retrieve the last 60 seconds of conversation!
- There are many different formats for different kinds of meeting purpose
- Both individuals – especially managers – and organisations need to commit to supporting these forms of interaction, if you want to embed new behaviours and establish walking meetings within the corporate culture
- The health benefits are real – both physiologically and psychologically.
Just watch the video to find out more.
To find out much more about weetings, in Dutch or English, go to the weeting.nl website.
Let us know how you get on with your weetings/walking meetings!
