KARLA PORTER

You know about man­age­ment by walk­ing around — and it works. You can’t sit at your com­mand post all day and truly expect to have a pulse on the orga­ni­za­tion. No mat­ter how many infor­mants you have work­ing for you. You have to get up and min­gle with the troops in their envi­ron­ments, job shadow them, have lunch in the cafe­te­ria, ask for their opin­ions on things, let them know straight from your mouth how valu­able they are to the orga­ni­za­tion… you get it.

Researchers at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity in St. Louis appar­ently feel the busi­ness world can cram even more hours and pro­duc­tiv­ity into the day by hold­ing meet­ings by walk­ing around. Do Researchers have expe­ri­ence with busi­ness meet­ings? You know, they usu­ally have con­cen­tra­tion and note tak­ing involved. I guess you could strap on a voice recorder.

Because some­where around 40% of Amer­i­cans are know to be couch pota­toes, these mea­sure­ment junkies feel that “meet­ings on the move” are the answer. Here is the advice given to hold a suc­cess­ful meet­ing in this mobile fash­ion, and my observations:

Appoint some­one to run the meet­ing
I’m sure there was no pun intended here, right?

Keep the agenda short
You would need to so it could be mem­o­rized because you are going to have to be Hou­dini to walk, read the agenda, par­tic­i­pate in the meet­ing and take notes.

Plan a sim­ple route
What is Debra Haire-Joshu, Pro­fes­sor of Social Work, try­ing to imply here? Every Black­berry has GPS these days!

Tell peo­ple to wear com­fort­able shoes and head out the door
You really think if you let them out they are com­ing back? Let’s not be so naive Debra.

Here’s my thought on how to encour­age and help employ­ees be health­ier. Do you remem­ber gym period in school? It was in there among the aca­d­e­mic class peri­ods. What if employ­ers adopted that type of work­place phi­los­o­phy to help express how much they care about employ­ees by pro­vid­ing them time to do some healthy activ­ity apart from the time they are given to cram down the sand­wich (oh wait, that’s usu­ally unpaid time)?

Healthy activ­ity could range from putting on those walk­ing shoes and head­ing out the door to a quiet dimly lit room where you could meditate.

Today’s work­place well­ness pro­grams largely rely on pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion about things you can do on your own time. They range from the group gym dis­count, the EAP phone num­ber you can call when you need some­one to talk to dur­ing an off hours cri­sis, to the occa­sional health fair in the cafe­te­ria where the health plan nurses come in to do blood pres­sure screen­ings, hand out mar­ket­ing tchotchkes and brochures about smok­ing cessation.

It’s not that all that isn’t impor­tant or a nice touch the HR depart­ment pro­vides but it’s cos­metic and passive.

Wouldn’t it be more pro­duc­tive if every­one left the agenda and the Black­berry at the com­mand post and had an oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice healthy activ­ity dur­ing those 2080+ hours they grease the cor­po­rate wheel?