We’ve all heard the values extolled on walking meetings. You’ll get some much-needed fresh air! You’ll enjoy a change of scenery! You’ll take one small step toward combating your sedentary lifestyle (“sitting is the new smoking,” after all)!. But workplace fads aside, walking meetings are a great way to shake things up during your next one-on-one meeting. And there are many reasons why.

For one thing, research has shown that long walks get the creative juices flowing (and thinkers like Steve Jobs and Sigmund Freud swore by them). The change in environment is a great way to think differently about problems and come up with solutions that might never have occurred to you otherwise. Walking meetings are also healthy (the obvious one, but worth stating). They also add up. If you start asking your direct reports to do a few turns around the block in your weekly one-on-one meetings, you’ll quickly see those steps piling up in your Fitbit.

In her TED Talk on walking meetings, Nilofer Merchant explains it this way: “Instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week. It’s changed my life.”

And if you need a more pragmatic reason to give walking meetings a try, they are a fantastic solution for startups with limited meeting space. If everything’s all booked up, don’t just pull a chair up to your employee’s desk, or, worse, cancel the one-on-one altogether. Just take it on the road!

Have we convinced you? Here are six tips to get you started.

TLDR:

• Walking boosts divergent thinking, making it best for one-on-ones, brainstorming, and career conversations, not whiteboard decisions
• Check in with your team before switching to walking meetings; mobility, noise, and privacy concerns are all valid reasons to adjust
• Keep your walking agenda to two or three open-ended topics, and skip any item that needs a shared screen or reference file
• Free-walking an unplanned route generates more original thinking than repeating a fixed path, per research
• Spinach joins your call, captures decisions and action items in real time, and routes them to your team’s tools before the walk ends

Here’s how to have walking meetings with your team:

Talk to your employees first

The last thing you want to do is alienate a team member by switching up your meeting style. If someone has limited mobility or any other reason why walking meetings aren’t a viable option for them, be sure to listen to their concerns and adjust your plan accordingly. For example, maybe instead of walking the whole time, you stroll over to a nearby park or cafe for some fresh air.

Beyond mobility, employees may raise other concerns worth hearing out: noise levels in busy outdoor spaces, privacy when discussing sensitive topics in public, or simply difficulty focusing outside a structured environment. A brief check-in before your first walking one-on-one removes the guesswork. Something like “I’d like to try a walking version of our next 1:1. Are there any reasons that wouldn’t work for you?” gives them a clear opening to flag anything without feeling put on the spot. Walking meetings work best when both people are genuinely on board.

Make sure your meeting goal is ideal for a walking meeting

Research is clear that walking boosts creative thinking, but the more useful question is which meeting types actually benefit from a stroll.

For example, this study found that exercise helped improve divergent thinking (so brainstorming, big-picture thinking and broad discussions), but had a negative impact on convergent thinking (like multiple-choice questions, or finding a single answer to a clearly laid-out problem).

That’s why walking meetings are so well-suited to one-on-one meetings, where the focus is on big-picture discussions on “topics of substance” instead of solving individual problems.

Remove distractions

This is a tough one. There will be plenty of distractions all around you when you take a walking meeting, especially if your office is located in a busy downtown core. But the trick is to try to avoid getting sidetracked at all costs.

First, that means keeping phone use to a minimum. It’s easy to feel like the walking meeting is a casual coffee run where you can fire off a couple quick texts, but it’s important to stay focused. Pull up your meeting agenda on one of your phones (more on that later!), and then pocket all other devices.

Second, avoid running errands. Grabbing a coffee or water at the start of the walking meeting is fine, but that’s it: no stops at the grocery store to grab a few things, or a quick pop into the dollar store to get envelopes. It sends the message that this time isn’t sacred.

Take your agenda on the go

Taking the meeting outside doesn’t mean the agenda goes away. And without a way to capture notes on the spot, decisions made mid-walk tend to evaporate before you’re back at your desk.

Keep the walking agenda short and topic-focused: two or three discussion items at most, each framed as an open-ended conversation starter. If an item needs a spreadsheet, a Figma file, or a shared screen to resolve, save it for a seated meeting. The best candidates are status check-ins, blockers, career conversations, and strategic questions where thinking out loud beats reviewing reference material.

Your best bet is a shared online agenda, paired with a real-time AI meeting assistant. Spinach is an AI meeting assistant that joins your call, captures decisions, action items, and named owners as they happen, and routes them in real time into the tools your team already uses, from Slack and Notion to Jira and HubSpot, so no manual re-keying is needed when you’re back at your desk.

Mix up your walking route

Once you start making walking meetings a habit, you’ll want to make sure you don’t get too set into a fixed route. One study found that people that “free walk” enjoy more original, creative thinking than people that walk in a set path.

So, try to make your route as twisty and windy as possible. Make unexpected turns and unplanned detours. A useful rule of thumb: plan a loose walking area instead of a fixed route, and know roughly how long it takes to loop back so a 30-minute meeting doesn’t turn into a 45-minute hike. In cities, a two-to-three block radius gives you plenty of variety. If the weather turns on you mid-walk, having a backup spot in mind, like a nearby lobby or a covered outdoor area, means the meeting keeps going. You’ll encourage creative thinking, and you might see some new parts of your city along the way.

Consider adding a pit stop

Here’s a secret: a walking meeting doesn’t have to include walking the whole time. You might want to add a stop at a park bench, or a little break at a coffee shop along the way. It will allow you both to take a quick breather, and also gives you a chance to update your one-on-one meeting agenda with any meeting notes you’ve discussed along your walk. A pit stop also creates a natural checkpoint: if you’ve already covered one agenda item during the walk, the pause is a good moment to confirm what was decided and what the next step is before moving on to the next topic.

What to do now

Next, here are some things you can do now that you've read this article:

1. You should check out our massive (& free) collection of meeting agenda templates to help you run more effective meetings.
2. Learn more about Spinach and how it can help you run a high performing org.
3. If you found this article helpful, please share it with others on Linkedin or X (Twitter)