People always have a good understanding of the gist of the meeting conversation—it’s when you ask them to share specific details when they struggle. Whether you’re taking notes, responding to a Slack message, or dozing off for a minute (let’s admit it—it’s easy to do when working from home), it’s easy to miss out on crucial information. However, there is a productivity hack that everyone should be taking advantage of, and that’s recording meetings. When you record a video call, you can go back in time and capture the information you missed.
Given today's technology, such as video conferencing solutions and smartphones, recording meeting conversations is easier than ever. Additionally, with conversation intelligence tools like Avoma, you can easily record, transcribe, and get AI-generated notes and detailed analyses of your calls and meetings.
If you ask anybody how the meeting went, they would probably tell you how they “felt” about it. They will give you a generic response, like “It was good” or “It wasn’t that great.”
People always have a good understanding of the gist of the meeting conversation; it’s when you ask them to share specific details when they struggle. And that’s when they wish they should have recorded the meeting so they could go back and listen to it again and capture a few details.
So it makes a lot of sense to record meetings if you look at it from a collaborative perspective rather than monitoring. Recording helps you remember what you discussed in the meeting, keeps everyone accountable, and improves how you interact with your meeting participants.
The short answer is: Yes, it is indeed ok and legal to record virtual meetings and calls.
The long answer is this—there are nuances to it, depending on geographic location, reasons to record the meeting, security aspects, and more.
While it’s perfectly legal to record meetings or calls in general, certain situations have legal sensitivity when it’s best not to record. If you have to record them, you need to limit access to those recordings. The laws for recording meetings are not universal. Some states require consent from both parties, whereas it might be legal to record with one party alone in some other states.
We highly recommend you to check out this detailed post on call recording laws and regulations around the world.
Sometimes the tiniest of details are the most important. However, it’s common to overlook essential information during meetings, especially when taking notes. When you record a meeting, you can review everything said or conveyed, capturing the information you missed the first time around.
Many companies task administrative assistants to take notes during meetings, distribute minutes, and archive these records. When online meetings are recorded, administrative professionals have a recording to rely on for clarity, thus avoiding any possible bias in interpreting the conversations.
Stakeholders and collaborators who aren’t part of the meeting can listen to the discussion in whole or in part as needed to stay contextually informed. This way, you avoid repeating yourself and wasting many people’s time.
Not everyone can attend every single meeting. If someone misses a call, you can send the missing participant a recording so they can listen, review, and be brought back up to speed on what they missed.
As an executive, you have a lot on your mind: deadlines, managing your team, project progress, decisions made, and more. In addition to your manual notes during the call, recording allows you to document and keep an audio and video record that can be democratized across your organization.
Sometimes people interpret meetings differently. If there’s any disagreement about a meeting’s content, a recording can serve as the definitive source of truth. Recorded sessions help clear any confusion, ultimately saving your business time and money.
A recording can be used as current evidence and prove your claims more efficiently. A centralized directory of minutes allows you to keep track of all your meetings for better compliance and peace of mind.
It’s often difficult to know how to conduct yourself during a meeting. Can your passion accidentally take precedence over your professionalism if a conflict arises? When you record a video call, you can learn about your areas of improvement and continue to work on them during further meetings.
Constructive feedback is key to developing top talent. Recording meetings can be valuable for leaders and managers to make observations and offer feedback. It's a powerful coaching practice to record how someone performs, either in a sales discovery meeting or a demo. Listening to examples of strong performance by other team members can be a helpful coaching tool.
Keeping track of all calls for a specific project or customer can be challenging if you are privy to several meetings. You can fully prepare yourself for future meetings by listening to past recordings. Recording meetings is also a helpful productivity tool for keeping people accountable for their action items.
Most organizations genuinely know very little about how meetings impact their businesses today. While there are a few user-friendly tools online for analyzing your work calendar that may tell you how much time you’re spending in meetings, getting that information for your company is challenging, if not impossible, for most businesses. When you record and archive all your meetings, you create a new data source that can provide a whole set of never-before-available information. This will help you learn and make better decisions about evolving your workplace’s meeting culture and more efficiently running your business.
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Yaagneshwaran Ganesh (popularly known as Yaag) is a HiHello contributor. Yaag is the Director of Content Marketing at Avoma, as well as an award-winning marketer, an author, podcaster and a TEDx speaker.
