Twice per week, Doug Hirsch takes a 45-minute walk around the block with one of his nearly 800 employees.
Hirsch, the co-CEO and founder of prescription drug savings company GoodRx, says he blocks out time for these "informal and conversational" walks because they make up for the "lost time" during the pandemic's height, when work interactions were mostly confined to screens.
It's a mutually beneficial way for Hirsch and his employees to build closer relationships with each other and uncover "some incredible new ideas" for the billion-dollar company, Hirsch tells CNBC Make It.
"It's a way of climbing over that barrier between myself and employees. I now have all these friends out there that actually want to work here, work together and get our job done," he adds. "They also feel more comfortable sharing their ideas with me, and some end up being really great."
Hirsch says he tries to cycle through all of his employees, typically asking higher-level managers to point him toward people he hasn't met with yet, regardless of their position or work performance. Sometimes, he'll go on walks with anyone who reaches out to him.
His only conversational rule on those walks: It "can never start with work," he says. "I'm a big fan of understanding their story, what their background is and where they want to be in the future."
Tori Marsh, the company's director of research, has been on a few of these walks over the past seven years.
"There are two categories during the walk: life and work. But we start out by talking about things like vacations and our family, or how we both enjoy tennis and going to Tahoe," she says. The "work" portion only comes when Marsh decides to "softball ideas" with Hirsch for what her research team can do next.
Hirsch says the conversations often naturally transition into the employee's personal experiences with health care and the nature of their job at GoodRx.
One recently involved a brainstorming session for how the company could become a trusted resource for Covid information, which led to the creation of a searchable database of drive-thru Covid testing sites, along with explainer pages that address common concerns about testing, symptoms and treatment, he says.
A CEO building friendships with employees could have some downsides, but Hirsch says he's yet to see one of his colleagues overstep any boundaries. The walks allow him and his employees to get closer without undermining their workplace respect for each other, he adds.
Other GoodRx employees have started using the strategy, too: Marsh, who lives in Denver, says she tries to go on one-on-one walks with members of her team or other coworkers whenever she visits GoodRx's Los Angeles office.
"We rarely sit in a room. We catch up on walks, and that's something we've always been doing as a company," she says, noting that they can replace "boring check-ins ... that can often be kind of stale."
You don't always have to go on walks to meet people one-on-one outside of the office, Hirsch says: As long as you're setting aside time for others, you have the opportunity to build closer relationships and find new ideas with potential.
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