537 - Record Every Meeting | RFD | Oxide
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published<br>RFD 537<br>RFD 537 Record Every Meeting
This RFD can be accessed by the following groups:[public]
State<br>published
RFD<br>537
Authors<br>Bryan Cantrill
Updated
Background<br>Oxide is a child of the pandemic: when the Bay Area issued its stay-at-home<br>order on March 16, 2020, Oxide was only a few months old, with just 15 people<br>(of whom 4 were entirely remote). With everyone remote, the disposition of<br>meetings naturally changed: instead of having in-person meetings which<br>accommodated remote attendees, our meetings became entirely remote. And in<br>part because the new primacy of video calls made it easy, we started<br>recording our weekly All Hands, starting<br>with the<br>March<br>23, 2020 meeting. (Though this was apparently not without incident:<br>among the first words recorded were "for those just tuning into the recording,<br>you really missed the entertainment of trying to get this thing recorded.")
In early April 2020, we changed from Zoom to Google Meet, and we discovered a<br>delightful feature: when recording a Google Meet associated with a scheduled<br>event, the resulting recording is attached to the event’s (past) calendar<br>invite. This integration by Google — a suprising one for a company that seems to value<br>creating (and destroying) things much more than making them work well together — proved invaluable, as it solved a discoverability problem for recordings:<br>one can use a past calendar to find past events.
Over the next few months, we<br>started recording more and more meetings, and by the fall of 2020, every standing<br>meeting (with the exception of the morning watercooler, 1:1s, and<br>hiring-related meetings) was being<br>regularly recorded. While this has been de facto (to the point that<br>RFD 455 discusses how recordings are managed), we have not written down<br>explicitly our policy or its rationale; this RFD seeks to provide both.
Why Record<br>Recording meetings is an expression of a number of Oxide values, including<br>our transparency , our teamwork , our rigor , our empathy , our<br>curiosity ,<br>our versatility and our thriftiness .
Transparency<br>First and foremost, the act of recording meetings is an expression of our<br>transparency. Indeed, in the very description of transparency in RFD 2, meetings<br>are explicitly called out:
We err on the side of transparency and communication: every Oxide employee<br>should feel that there is a standing invitation to any meeting.
The phraseology wasn’t an accident, but rather an intentional embodiment of<br>specific wisdom from an early advisor to Oxide: in his experience in the<br>formative stages of companies, when meetings didn’t have an open invitation,<br>it was too easy for people to believe that meetings conveyed status — and<br>to feel like those who were not were being deliberately<br>excluded from decision making.
While we have made clear that everyone is invited to every meeting from the<br>outset at Oxide, recorded meetings allow us to do one better: one can attend<br>a meeting after the fact, without disrupting participants — and at 2X. This,<br>in turn, gives us the space to trust one another: we do not have to fear<br>our colleagues meeting without us!
Teamwork<br>Recording meetings is essential to our teamwork, in many dimensions.
First, in organizations of all sizes, miscommunication impedes teamwork.<br>Often, the miscommunication is well-intentioned: someone attends a meeting<br>that they believe is germane to someone else, and they attempt to relay what<br>they heard — but due to miscommunication or mistaken inference, the wrong<br>conclusion is drawn. Add a few hops, and one has the<br>childen’s game of telephone,<br>with results that are often not merely silly but also destructive. By<br>recording meetings, one can go straight to the source, minimizing the<br>potential for miscommunication.
Second, recording meetings allows even attendees to hear things that they<br>might have missed. Especially when one is always at a keyboard when in<br>a meeting, it is easy to have gone down a tangent on a prior subject<br>and miss some important details of the current subject of discussion.<br>Having a recording allows one to go back<br>and relisten to those missed bits.
Third, recording meetings makes it easier for someone to join a team.<br>Especially when one is new, a team can sound as if it is speaking a foreign<br>language; by having a recording, a new teammate can replay aspects of a<br>conversation that they did not understand (repeatedly, if necessary),<br>allowing the new member to quickly learn the argot of the team. Moreover,<br>that meetings are recorded allows a new team member to listen to<br>past conversations to get fuller context for the team’s current work<br>and future roadmap.
Finally, recording meetings makes it easier to be absent from a team. On a<br>fast-moving team, weeks can feel like months of progress — and it can be very<br>difficult to return from being away. Recording meetings allows one to catch<br>up on the salient bits, if and as needed.
Rigor<br>At Oxide, we like to get...