Productivity Anti-Patterns: Video as Meeting Notes

Sometimes you need to see a poor way of doing something to see a better way – that’s the point of an anti-pattern. The purpose is to teach us how not to do something.

We sometime forget that productivity is a shared responsibility and a collective value. There’s no point in one person being hyper-productive if their practices cause significant pain to others. So much of what I see as productivity practices are precisely that – people optimising for the one and causing significant problems for the many.

In recent years recording meetings has become effectively free. All of the major video conferencing/collaboration platforms include the capability and most of them also include free storage for meeting recordings. In many circles, it has become standard practice to record almost every meeting.

Why wouldn’t you? It’s free and gives a full record of the meeting.

There’s more: some of the collaboration tools now include, as standard, an automated transcript of the meeting. Brilliant? You don’t have to trawl the whole video to find what you are looking for, you can search the transcript for the relevant part. Everyone who was invited to the meeting has all of the information available whether they were able to attend or not.

This is where the productivity anti-pattern starts

If we have a video of the meeting and a transcript of it then we don’t need to take notes or minutes for the meeting? We have all of the information automatically, why burden the secretary (remember them?) of the meeting with typing something up and distributing it? Wrong.

Summarising a meeting in notes and minutes is a skill with immense value to the reader, and also to the producer. Here’s a list of just a few:

• The summary is far easier to reference than the transcript. In a transcript you have to make sure that you understand the full context, this often requires reading the whole transcript. You can’t read, or watch, just a few minutes because you can’t be confident that a subject was revisited later in the meeting.
• Minutes, including actions, allowing people to understand what is expected of them quickly and easily. The act of writing the action out helps with understanding the action.
• A summary can be revisited at the start of a meeting to get people up to speed a transcript never can.
• A summary allows people to take a meeting out of their head, where it is using up useful cycles, and put it to one side until the next time it is needed. A video or transcript doesn’t do this in the same way, for me at least.
• Notes of a meeting outline the conclusions of the meeting, not all of the working-out. Often the working out is of no value to the people responsible for taking actions from the meeting. Sometimes the working-out has value, but that’s normally as people progress the actions trying to understand context.
• Producing notes and minutes are an opportunity for the meeting secretary to be review whether the meeting fulfilled its objective. It’s so easy to finish a meeting thinking that everything has been covered only to discover that something vital was missed.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t video and transcribe meetings, but I am saying that using these as a replacement for good meeting practices including notes and minutes is a productivity anti-pattern.

One aspect that I haven’t covered is the psychological impact of videoing a meeting. There are many occasions where this isn’t an issue, but there are still many where people feel constrained by the thought that there words are going to be available for everyone to listen to. Video is great for the active vocal participants, it’s not good for the quiet contemplative.

Using the video of a meeting as the minutes may optimise the world of the meeting organiser (who is the de-facto secretary), it significantly decreases the productivity of everyone else in the meeting.

As a footnote: I’m not sure that continuing to optimise the organisation of meetings is a good thing. It leads to more poorly organised meetings – it’s experiencing the washing machine effect (more on that another time).

Header image: Sitting out for a pub meal on the Kirkstone pass.