Most business owners are constantly looking for ways to improve the effectiveness and/or efficiency of their meetings. Meetings can be a massive waste of time if they aren’t planned or executed properly, but there are certain steps you can take to greatly increase the chances of a meeting being a success—and one of them is video recording.
How to Video Record a Meeting
The solutions for video recording your meetings range from simple to complicated, and vary depending on your budget and your goals. Anyone with a smartphone can likely record a basic capture of your meeting, but according to Intelligent Video Solutions, it’s better to use a platform designed for recording meetings and presentations. With a dedicated video capture and management platform, you’ll find it much easier to start and stop recordings, and keep all your recordings organized over time.
The Benefits of Video Recording Your Meetings
So why would you spend this extra time and effort to record video of your meetings?
- Reaching participants who couldn’t make it. First, and perhaps most obviously, you’ll be making each meeting available to participants who weren’t able to make it in person. If one of your clients can’t attend, they can get an update remotely. If one of your employees is on vacation, they can review the meeting’s contents when they get back. Instead of relying on someone else’s notes or secondhand information on how the meeting went down, they can review it themselves and see and hear the interactions within.
- Easing invite pressure.Along similar lines, having a video recording of a meeting eases the pressure you might feel to invite more people to the meeting. Many managers and team leaders err on the side of inviting people, adding meeting attendees who are only marginally or peripherally associated with the topic at hand. This practice is highly inefficient, resulting in more participants who have no reason to be present. But with a video recording on hand, you can err on the side of limited invites, providing the recording to anyone on the fringe who might be interested in only some portions of the meeting.
- Preserving the meeting in full.Recorded video captures the entirety of the meeting, including everything that was said or mentioned during the conference. You could feasibly do this with detailed meeting notes, or with an audio recording, but video recording adds a secondary piece of information; a visual stream. With a video recording, you’ll be able to not just hear what people are saying, but also see the expressions and body language they use to say it. In some contexts and some types of meetings, this information is vital for a complete understanding of the situation.
- Reviewing the meeting for potential improvements.Video capture is also important for reviewing meetings for potential improvements in the future. It’s always possible to host a better meeting, with potential improvements like staying on topic, encouraging people to talk more, inviting more appropriate personnel, or including more visuals. When you’re in a meeting, or shortly after, you may feel a lingering sense that it didn’t go as well as it could have, with no clear idea of what, specifically, went wrong. With a video file, you can review things minute by minute and determine exactly when people stopped paying attention, or find the first link in the chain that caused you to deviate from the topic at hand. It’s an important source of information when you’re trying to improve.
- Future research and exploration.In the near or distant future, you, your coworkers, and your clients may want or need to look back on meetings like this to review old conversations, unearth more details, or simply get a refresher on what went down. Video recordings are easier to search through than meeting notes, especially when you’re looking for a single statement, or if you can recall the specific section during the meeting where this critical piece of information was revealed.
- Light performance pressure.Having video rolling, capturing the contents of the meeting, also puts some light pressure on meeting participants to actively engage in productive They may be more likely to stay on topic, less likely to interrupt, and more likely to contribute valuable information if they know they’re being recorded.
If you feel like your meetings aren’t quite as efficient or well-executed as they could be, video recording might be the most important improvement you make. It doesn’t take much time or effort to establish a set process for recording your meetings, and once you take this step, you’ll start gaining access to all the information you review as a group. The sooner you start, the further your archives will reach, so don’t delay in instituting this new policy.