Business Netwalking

Netwalking guide

Walking Meetings

A walking meeting is the internal cousin of netwalking: an existing meeting between people who already work together, taken outdoors and conducted on foot. There is no networking element, no organiser, and no reshuffle. What it shares with netwalking is the mechanism — side-by-side conversation, movement, and the absence of a table — and most of the benefits transfer.

Two colleagues walking a city park path between office buildings on a bright weekday morning

What does not transfer is the assumption that it suits every meeting. The walking meeting has a bad reputation in some organisations, and it earned it by being applied indiscriminately.

Which meetings walk well

Three types work reliably:

  • The one-to-one. This is the strongest use. A regular check-in between a manager and a team member is a conversation, not a document review, and it improves markedly outdoors. The removal of the desk removes a good deal of the hierarchy with it, and the things people find hard to say tend to get said around the second corner rather than not at all.
  • The exploratory or scoping conversation. Anything of the form "how might we approach this" belongs on foot. The research is directly supportive here: the Stanford research on walking and divergent thinking found substantial gains in open-ended idea generation while walking, with some of the effect persisting after sitting down again.
  • The difficult conversation that is not a formal process. Clearing the air, re-establishing a working relationship, giving feedback that is not disciplinary. The lack of eye contact lowers the temperature considerably.

Which meetings do not

Equally clear-cut:

  • Anything requiring a document or a screen. Reviewing a spreadsheet from memory on a footpath is not a meeting, it is a memory test.
  • Anything requiring a record. If minutes matter, or if the meeting has procedural consequences, it happens at a table. Formal performance discussions, disciplinary matters and anything with an HR process attached should never be walked — the informality is precisely wrong, and the absence of a record disadvantages the person with less power.
  • Anything with more than three people. Four walkers cannot hold one conversation on a path. It splits into two, and the split is invisible to whoever called the meeting.
  • Anything where a participant would rather not. Which is the point below.

The consent problem

This is the failure mode that gives walking meetings their bad name. When a manager proposes a walking one-to-one, a team member who would rather not walk — because of pain, fatigue, footwear, a hidden condition, a hijab and a hot day, a bad night's sleep, or simple preference — is being asked to decline their manager's suggestion and give a reason. Many will not.

The fix is to make the offer genuinely symmetrical. Offer it as one of two options rather than as the plan: "We can do this in the room or walk it — which would you prefer?" Ask early enough that someone can bring different shoes. And accept "let's stay in" without a follow-up question, every time. A walking meeting culture that people cannot opt out of has produced a new obligation rather than a better meeting.

Running one well

Keep it short. Thirty to forty minutes is the sweet spot; beyond an hour the meeting is no longer the reason you are outside.

Pick a route you do not have to think about — a loop you both know, so that navigation does not intrude. City parks, riversides, campus perimeters and quiet residential loops all work. Avoid anywhere you have to raise your voice, and avoid anywhere you will meet colleagues repeatedly, since a conversation interrupted four times is not a conversation.

Agree the three or four things you want to cover before you set off. Without an agenda a walking meeting reliably becomes a pleasant wander that resolves nothing, and that is the second-biggest reason people abandon the practice.

Capturing the output

The genuine cost of a walking meeting is that nobody is writing anything down, and this is where most of them leak value. Three approaches work:

  1. Stop to capture. When something important is decided, stop walking, and one person writes it on a phone. Thirty seconds. Stopping also signals that it mattered.
  2. Voice note at the end. Before you go back inside, one of you records a two-minute summary. This is by far the most reliable method and the least used.
  3. Immediate write-up. Whoever called the meeting writes the three actions before doing anything else. Ten minutes after returning, half of it is already gone.

The rule of thumb: if a meeting has more than about three outputs, it was probably not a walking meeting.

The sedentary argument

There is a secondary case for walking meetings that has nothing to do with conversation quality. Desk-based work involves a great deal of sitting, and WHO guidance on physical activity and sedentary behaviour is explicit that reducing sedentary time carries benefit independent of hitting activity targets. Converting two seated half-hours a week into walked ones is a small, free change.

It should be presented as exactly that — a small free change — and not as a wellbeing programme. Organisations that market walking meetings as a health initiative tend to make them compulsory-feeling, at which point the consent problem above becomes structural.

How this relates to netwalking

The distinction is worth keeping clear. A walking meeting is internal, unstructured and between people who already know each other. A netwalk is external, deliberately structured, and exists to introduce people who do not. The techniques overlap — pace, route, capture — but the design problems are different. If you arrived here looking for the external format, what netwalking is is the better starting point.