No one watches meeting recordings

A clarification. No one watches post-pandemic meeting recordings. Better. No one watches post-pandemic work meeting recordings which amass 4-5 hours a day. Working from home, purposes of meetings vary a lot. Here are a few that I am finding around:

1. Brainstorming and attempting to come to a conclusion
2. Onboarding people on an agenda
3. Transferring knowledge to a wider public
4. Co-working

Most useful meetings are co-working, rest are usually atrocities. These are not always bad, it's just that we aren't trained to run them correctly in a remote situation. On-site, type 1 and 2 are much easier but remotely they need much more than just a move to meet/zoom.

Coming to recordings, we record a lot of meetings from category 1, 2 and 3. Rest are archival¹ but 3 is something which we tend to look as repeatable pieces where we can ask people to watch old recordings instead of doing re-runs.

Consider this category again. Let's call them lessons. Remember watching video lessons on internet? How low our level of tolerance usually is? Only the best of the creators survive and become famous. Even people with solid credentials don't always fly when it comes to engaging the audience. Assuming a previously on-site team is going to be all at that level is just plain folly.

I would probably cut down the lessons to around 30% which actually need more than a static pdf. Half of those can go better on an interactive web page. Rest are machining videos where you are showing how to work with power tools or something much nicer. What's missing is not even being developed. The best courses/content on the internet just don't talk and record, they use more engaging techniques. Consider channels like 3b1b for example.

While I don't know watching stats of meet/zoom recordings, I have the following claim:

No one watches meeting recordings. Because they are bad. Specially the lessons. Feedback won't flow from the watchers to help you here since it's a new situation on the surface. But it really is an old situation at it's core.

Make better content and stop using recording hand-offs as alibis.