This meeting is being recorded… If you’re like me, when you read that phrase, you could hear that automated voice in your head. Recording meetings has become the default behavior for many of us as we seek to better manage the ever-increasing volume of things we must do and keep track of. What could be better? With a click of a button, software captures and saves every scrap of information from that meeting. Better yet, with a second click it transcribes that recording into easily savable and searchable text. Now, thanks to the rapid expansion of generative AI, that content can be instantly summarized, with key themes identified and to-dos assigned. In these ways, such technologies absolutely facilitate our ability to capture what happens in online meetings, which for most workers increased in frequency since the Covid-19 pandemic. However, leaders must recognize that these tools affect the social fabric of those meetings—particularly psychological safety and engagement. How Gen AI Tools Can Change Meeting Dynamics Psychological safety is the shared belief within a group that it’s ok to take risks, express ideas, and make mistakes. Google’s project Aristotle identified psychological safety as one of the most critical determinants of team success. In short, a group—be it a team, organization, or the people attending a meeting—feels psychologically safe to me because I can predict the behavior of the people within it. The problem is that capturing meetings changes the boundaries of that group. When we capture a meeting, we introduce the possibility that it can be easily shared with people who weren’t part of the original discussion and with whom some or all the participants might not feel safe. If you’ve ever opted not to put what you were thinking in writing, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is a concern we’ve always had with emails and memos, but in those mediums it’s easy to be selective about what information and recipients to include. Critically, this concern now impacts the social dynamics of the group in ways that leaders should care about. Generative AI summaries affect psychological safety not by changing the boundaries of the group but by changing the content itself—when you ask your video conferencing software to summarize a meeting, it chooses what to include and what to leave out. A collaborator and I recently had this experience when we read through the AI-generated transcript of our meeting only to discover a significant portion of the notes and to-dos focused on a side conversation sparked by an offhand comment about a my collaborator’s kitchen tiles. (Here’s a snippet: “Amy expressed her excitement about the new triangular tiles she found in the tile store, contrasting them with the more common subway tiles. Mark shared his experience of redoing his parents’ house, including the choice of standard white subway tiles.”) While this innocuous example led to a good laugh, it’s easy to see how an algorithm—without sense of what is or isn’t on topic or appropriate to be captured and logged—flagged this as a to-do. This applies to language as well: Perhaps you’ve discovered that your carefully framed and worded message read as blunt and aggressive when summarized by AI. Why Leaders Should Be Thoughtful About Using AI Meeting Tools First, psychological safety directly impacts outcomes by improving the quality of both the data under discussion and the process by which it’s used in decisions. It plays a particularly critical role in supporting innovation, as it’s impossible to innovate without risk. Each wild idea or challenge to the status quo that members of a meeting decide not to commit to the permanent record removes the raw materials required for innovation. Second, psychological safety improves collaboration by strengthening interpersonal bonds and trust. In my team dynamics sessions, I always ask executives to reflect on their best experiences in teams and the drivers thereof, and trust is always near the top of the list. One of the best ways we build trust is by being open and vulnerable—neither of which we do when we don’t feel psychologically safe. It was a leader being unwilling to show personal vulnerability in front of colleagues in online meetings that led Amy Edmondson and I to write about the parallel challenge of psychological safety in hybrid environments—now imagine if those meetings had been recorded. It’s important to keep in mind that we’ve known for close to 25 years that informal, unplanned sharing is critical for creating mutual knowledge and is thus particularly critical for collaborations where participants are remote from each other. Third, psychological safety is a critical contributor to individual development and growth because it allows individuals to be curious and experiment. The safer we feel, the more likely we are to try out a new role in a meeting or to explore a line of thinking we aren’t completely sure of. It’s important to recognize that our default is to stay in our lane, but branching out is how we learn and develop new skills, and we’re less likely to do so when we know it will be captured. How to Decide Whether to Use AI Meeting Tools As is often the case, the best way to address this challenge is to ask the right questions: Ask: “Why?” There is no question that hitting record, transcribe, and summarize save significant time over doing those tasks by hand. However, the first, simplest question leaders should ask is why—exactly—do you think you need this meeting to be captured? What is the purpose of the meeting? Is this a decision meeting in which you want documentary proof of the steps that lead to your conclusion? Is this a brainstorming meeting where you’ll be generating ideas at a volume and speed you can’t otherwise retain? In short, do you have a plan for how you’ll use this information, or is it simply a feature in search of a use? I do a lot of interviews for my research, and this is a long-standing question: Is the cost and impact of recording (and then transcribing) an interview worth it, or will my notes do the trick? Ask yourself how often you go back to and use the transcripts you generated. How does that stack up against the points above? Here it’s also important to recognize that the act of taking notes increases our own engagement and keeps us focused. This doesn’t mean you should never capture meetings without a detailed use plan—sometimes “just in case” is a good-enough reason. But the key here is to make a conscious decision and ask yourself how bad would it be if you didn’t have a recording. Ask: “How?” Second, ask how you think the meeting is going to evolve. Is this likely to be a contentious discussion or a mundane one? Are tempers likely to flare, or do you expect a relaxed conversation? Tension and conflict are natural processes and parts of every effective organization. The more you think this meeting will evolve into dynamics that people might not want captured, the more you should consider whether it’s worth hitting record. I once had an executive admit to using the record button to keep the lid on a hot issue, but we all know that norm-setting and clear roles are far better ways to manage group conflict. Ask: “Who?” Third, ask who is attending the meeting. Does everyone in the meeting have similar levels of seniority, power, and experience? How well do people know each other—are they good friends, work acquaintances, or have they never met? Groups with significant power differences feel riskier for those with low power, so consider whether you want to introduce something that might make those individuals feel less safe. Similarly, interactions with people we don’t know are inherently riskier because we have less experiential evidence assuring us that we will be safe. Finally, recognize that not everyone on the team will have the same willingness to be open when being recorded. When it comes to psychological safety, leaders need to pay attention not to the average level of safety, but to the safety of those most at risk (i.e., it’s not the average depth of the river that matters, but its deepest point). Ask: “How?” Fourth, implementation matters, so ask how to decide whether to capture a meeting. Should this be your decision as a leader, or do you want to open it up to the group? Is this a fixed policy or something you decide ad hoc, on an as-needed basis? Here is where it’s important to remember that there’s a very big difference between opt-in and opt-out (as routinely cited in data on organ donation). Recognize, of course, that expecting someone to speak up and tell a group that they don’t feel safe being recorded is more than a little contradictory. . . . Of course, the decision of whether to record, transcribe, and/or summarize is not life or death; there are far more mission-critical decisions to make on a given day. But over time, these effects can stack up, and leaders who take psychological safety and team dynamics seriously need to give some thought to whether, how, and why to use these tools.
