Are You Recording This?
With eight in ten firms now recording meetings, a fourfold jump in six years, leaders worry that important conversations are being stifled.
It’s being asked in team meetings on Zoom. It’s being asked in job interviews. It’s being asked in boardrooms and C-suites as well. “Does this conversation need to be recorded?”
In an era in which every move is filmed and every spoken word is preserved and transcribed, people are starting to pay more attention to that ubiquitous little notification that appears before meetings informing them that they are being recorded. Experts say leaders are privately questioning if indiscriminately recording every meeting is stifling creativity and creating a sterile business environment. Peter McDermott, head of the corporate affairs practice at Korn Ferry, calls it the “what will the AI summary say” effect. “People feel on guard and are in presentation mode because they are thinking about who is going to be reading the transcript or watching the replay afterward,” he says.
Companies have been recording meetings for years, of course, but just how prevalent the practice is might be a surprise to some. More than 80% of firms say they record meetings, up from 16% in 2020, primarily because of the pandemic and the shift to remote work. But that’s on an enterprise basis. Individually, a similar percentage of professionals now use personal AI tools to record meetings. The impact on business has been tangible: 84% of professionals admit they filter comments or talk differently when they know an AI tool is recording them. McDermott recounts an anecdote from a recent board meeting at which a director asked for recording to be paused because of privacy concerns before he read a statement.
But it’s not just directors who are worried. Danielle Smith, a principal in Korn Ferry’s Financial Officers practice, says that during the recruiting process, some job candidates or interviewers are asking that a meeting not be recorded. “It can be awkward,” she says. She points out that information recruiters technically aren’t supposed to ask or know about—subjects like age, marriage status, and kids—often gets shared in these conversations. “So how is it stored and considered?” she asks.
To be sure, privacy is only one of many concerns executives and professionals have about recording meetings, particularly since the advent of AI. Legal liability, leaking of proprietary or confidential information, and lack of context around comments, particularly about clients or colleagues, are some others. But by far the single biggest concern among leaders is a “loss of candor—more specifically, a lack of spontaneous thought and an unwillingness to challenge ideas. That—and what happens to the recordings and AI transcripts.
“Who owns the executive conversation once it’s recorded?” asks Scott Sette, a Korn Ferry senior client partner in the Healthcare practice. He worries that firms have few, if any, parameters governing their use of these recordings. “Where is it being stored? For how long?”
For her part, Tamara Rodman, a senior client partner in the culture, change and communications practice at Korn Ferry, worries that the more firms record meetings by default, the more they are eroding its collective voice. She says self-censoring or over-rehearsing can breed an environment of extreme self-awareness, which can itself eventually morph into a culture of fear and a homogenization of opinion. “Thinking about what you say before it comes out of your mouth is a good thing,” she says. “But you might get better results by working toward more organic, authentic discussions that build trust between colleagues.”
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