Recording meetings is an expression of a number of Oxide values, including our transparency, our teamwork, our rigor, our empathy, our curiosity, our versatility and our thriftiness.
Transparency
First and foremost, the act of recording meetings is an expression of our transparency. Indeed, in the very description of transparency in RFD 2, meetings are explicitly called out:
We err on the side of transparency and communication: every Oxide employee should feel that there is a standing invitation to any meeting.
The phraseology wasn’t an accident, but rather an intentional embodiment of specific wisdom from an early advisor to Oxide: in his experience in the formative stages of companies, when meetings didn’t have an open invitation, it was too easy for people to believe that meetings conveyed status — and to feel like those who were not were being deliberately excluded from decision making.
While we have made clear that everyone is invited to every meeting from the outset at Oxide, recorded meetings allow us to do one better: one can attend a meeting after the fact, without disrupting participants — and at 2X. This, in turn, gives us the space to trust one another: we do not have to fear our colleagues meeting without us!
Teamwork
Recording meetings is essential to our teamwork, in many dimensions.
First, in organizations of all sizes, miscommunication impedes teamwork. Often, the miscommunication is well-intentioned: someone attends a meeting that they believe is germane to someone else, and they attempt to relay what they heard — but due to miscommunication or mistaken inference, the wrong conclusion is drawn. Add a few hops, and one has the childen’s game of telephone, with results that are often not merely silly but also destructive. By recording meetings, one can go straight to the source, minimizing the potential for miscommunication.
Second, recording meetings allows even attendees to hear things that they might have missed. Especially when one is always at a keyboard when in a meeting, it is easy to have gone down a tangent on a prior subject and miss some important details of the current subject of discussion. Having a recording allows one to go back and relisten to those missed bits.
Third, recording meetings makes it easier for someone to join a team. Especially when one is new, a team can sound as if it is speaking a foreign language; by having a recording, a new teammate can replay aspects of a conversation that they did not understand (repeatedly, if necessary), allowing the new member to quickly learn the argot of the team. Moreover, that meetings are recorded allows a new team member to listen to past conversations to get fuller context for the team’s current work and future roadmap.
Finally, recording meetings makes it easier to be absent from a team. On a fast-moving team, weeks can feel like months of progress — and it can be very difficult to return from being away. Recording meetings allows one to catch up on the salient bits, if and as needed.
Rigor
At Oxide, we like to get the details right — and we have a team with very deep technical expertise. By recording meetings, we are able to capture that expertise and broadcast it. For example, if the need for an RFD arises from a discussion in a meeting (a not uncommon occurrence!), it can be extraordinarily helpful to be able to replay the conversation to make sure that necessary detail is being captured.
Empathy
It can be a struggle to hear ourselves as someone else hears us; by recording a meeting, we are able to hear ourselves in a different light — and can learn new things about ourselves. For example, it is very hard to listen to a conversation while also waiting to make a contribution to it; more than once, someone has listened to a meeting recording and realized that while they were waiting to make a point, someone else made an important point that sailed by them.
Curiosity and Versatility
By recording meetings, we can stoke our curiosity and build our own versatility: it becomes much easier for anyone in the company to learn about disparate domains. It may be tempting to think of this purely in terms of technical domains, but this is just as true in non-technical domains. For example, when meetings are recorded, one can learn how a sales team functions, or how an engineering team works through a roadmap, or how a marketing team might brainstorm a whitepaper, or what a support call sounds like. By not only sating our curiosity but also building our versatility, recorded meetings present us with unique pedagogical value.
Thriftiness
While it almost goes without saying, recording meetings is very inexpensive — and in stark contrast to the relatively recent past, when recording every meeting would have been economically infeasible. That it is so cheap allows us to easily switch our disposition from "why record?" to "why not record?"