Recording meetings

Tell everyone, every time

Recording law varies substantially between jurisdictions — some require only one participant's consent, others require everyone's, and workplace rules often go further than the law. Beyond compliance, announcing it changes the meeting: people speak differently when they know, and discovering a recording afterwards damages trust in a way that is hard to repair.

The practical approach: start the recorder, then say at the top that you are recording and ask if anyone objects. That gets consent on tape and gives people a real chance to say no.

In-person meetings

One laptop or phone on the table, roughly equidistant from everyone. Physics is the constraint here — a microphone two metres from a quiet speaker at the far end of a table will capture them poorly, and no software fixes it.

• Place the device in the middle rather than in front of you.
• Ask people to speak up, and to say their name before speaking in a large group. It transforms the transcript.
• Avoid putting the device on a surface people tap, shuffle papers on, or set cups down on — contact noise is far louder in the recording than in the room.
• For a large room, a cheap USB conference microphone is a significant improvement.

Online meetings

This page records your microphone, so it captures your side of a call but not the other participants. To record the whole call there are two routes: the platform's own recording feature, which usually stores it in that vendor's cloud, or the tab audio recorder, which captures a browser tab's audio locally in Chrome or Edge.

The tab route is the one to use when the recording must not leave your organisation. It requires the meeting to be in a browser tab rather than a desktop client, and it still requires everyone's consent.

Long meetings

Afterwards

A recording is only useful if someone can find things in it. Note the time when a decision is made or an action is assigned — five seconds during the meeting saves rewinding through an hour later. Transcription is worth considering for anything you will reference repeatedly, since searchable text beats scrubbing through audio every time.

Then think about retention. Meeting recordings accumulate and often contain more than anyone intended. Delete what you no longer need.

• Tab audio recorderFor capturing an online call.
• Recording interviewsConsent in one-to-one settings.
• DictaphoneFor dictating notes after the meeting.
• Recording on WindowsWhen Teams is holding the microphone.

More in use cases

• Recording a voice acting demo
• Recording a podcast
• Recording singing
• Recording interviews

See all use cases — the right recording setup depends on the job: what you are capturing, and where the file goes afterwards.

Questions