Why a Business Meeting on a Treadmill Could Boost Your Productivity

Some of the best creative thinking is done away from the office, so is it time to embrace the trend for holding meetings in unusual locations?

When Annie Auerbach and her business partner, Adam Chmielowski, were stuck on a detail about setting up their new cultural insight agency, Starling, they walked to a park near their London office and sat on a hill overlooking the city to make plans.

“Then some actual starlings, the birds themselves, turned up to our meeting and hopped about on the grass. It felt like a good omen,” she says. Auerbach, author of a new book, Flex, about how to work flexibly, is a big advocate of getting out of the traditional office environment when she needs to discuss something important.

“Some of our best ideas and conversations happen on walks – a time which otherwise would be a dead zone of getting from A to B,” she says. Walking allows the mind to wander, which has been shown to be fertile for creative ideas and flashes of insight. “When we don’t try hard to have an idea, it comes to us. Walking meetings are a great way to deliberately shake things up.”

She is not alone. From walking meetings to more vigorous encounters during exercise classes, people are increasingly opting for a different backdrop to the classic boardroom or joyless meeting room when they need to arrange a business pow-wow.

Barry’s Bootcamp,a cult gym with branches around the world, even offers a corporate concierge booking service for people who want to chat business during an early morning treadmill session. “We have a lot of ‘two spots’, which are people ‘sweat-entertaining’,” says Vicky Land, vice-president of brand strategy. “We’ve seen an increase in early bookings to ensure side-by-side spots. It’s especially common for people in finance.”

More casual settings, such as theatre foyers or the members’ rooms of art galleries, are also proving popular and can give business meetings a more relaxed and creative vibe.

Matt Hale, head of visitor experience at London’s Southbank Centre, says the arts and culture venue recently upgraded its wifi to make life easier for the “village of people” waiting to use the empty foyer as a base when the doors open at 10am each day. The variety of people using the space for meetings range from “more creative types and young people to a few in suits”, he says, with many returning again and again.

Just along the river, at the National Theatre, executive director Lisa Burger, who oversaw the drive to open up the site’s public spaces, reports a similar trend, with the numbers using the building as a meeting venue on the rise. “The different areas lend themselves to different working styles, from the refectory-style tables, to the soft furnishings elsewhere.” She sees groups of up to 10 or 12 using the space for meetings. “Once you get beyond that size, it can get slightly tricky. But I admire the ingenuity of people who find some of the quieter spaces.”

Both Hale and Burger are happiest when people purchase food and drink their venues’ many cafes offer. Operators of public venues typically need some form of payback for providing free workspaces.

One of the obstacles to fuelling such meetings with food and coffee, however, is the hassle of having to submit cumbersome expense claims. Fortunately, new technologies have made it much easier for people meeting in unusual places to do their expenses admin.

Mobile apps such as Concur Expense by SAP Concur log expenses on the spot, whether that’s in a gym or a museum’s cafe. A business meeting’s participants can take a photo of their receipts with their phone, creating an expense claim on the go. The app uses character recognition technology and machine learning to intelligently read each submitted receipt – including those that feature messy handwriting – to figure out what category of expense the receipt relates to and then process it accordingly as a completed expense claim. It can also figure out other factors, such as how much of the total bill the service charge represents.

In the backend, the Concur Expense mobile app can process the data to ensure nothing is missing or duplicated, in line with a company’s travel and expense policies. The app also applies any relevant VAT rules so that the business is able to reclaim it.

Handling admin tasks in the moment with as little human input as possible helps stop expenses piling up and can free up time and energy.

For Faris Yakob, who runs nomadic creative consultancy Genius Steals with his wife, Rosie, meetings have to happen on the move, because they live out of their carry-on luggage. Once, he recalls, the duo were in Los Angeles when a new London-based client was visiting New York. “So we both flew to Nashville to meet at a bowling alley-cum-social club called Pinewood Social.”

Yakob thinks meeting in unusual places is also more fun: “[It] leads to better relationships and better thinking, despite being logistically more complex.” Other advantages include often turning client relationships into friendships, which leads to more business, he adds.

That said, meetings held outside the office aren’t necessarily always more productive. Steven Rogelberg, chancellor’s professor at UNC Charlotte, in North Carolina, and author of a new book, The Surprising Science of Meetings, warns there are potential advantages to leaving the office, but these are not a given. “You might just be bringing the meeting dysfunction to another location,” he says.

He favours walking meetings over other exercise-based forms of business interaction because they are more inclusive, but he cautions against inviting more than three people. Participants also need to be notified in advance so they can dress appropriately. He also advises the host to plan the route and think carefully about what they hope to achieve from the outing. For anything involving visual presentations, walking meetings can be tricky.

“While having meetings in alternative places can provide stimulation and increase focus by being away from the workplace, additional distractions can wipe out any positives,” he says. Another risk is that remote meetings tend to be longer because people have travelled to get somewhere, he says.

A simple alarm clock app would help with that.

SAP Concur provides intelligent solutions to help your business automate expenses on the go – giving you more freedom and the visibility you need to run your business more effectively. The intelligent technology can also detect non-compliant expenses. For more information go to: concur.co.uk/expense