In the era of Zoom calls and hybrid work, white-collar workers are used to being on camera. Whether their employer should analyze the footage is another question.
Thomas Laffont, cofounder of the hedge fund giant Coatue Management, made his case for the idea on TBPN this week: “I believe that meetings should be recorded.”
Laffont said that while a compliance department might say “we can’t have meetings being recorded because it creates a paper trail,” doing so would lead to a “better world.”
Laffont referenced two hypothetical scenarios with a bad actor. In the first, meetings are not recorded, and someone speaks out a decade later to say there was a “pattern of deception” but that “nothing happened.”
In the second, meetings are recorded. When the individual acts poorly, they get an email from the compliance system. The next time, they get flagged to human resources.
“I would much rather live in world number two,” Laffont said. “You know what the problem is. There’s a system.”
Laffont presented the idea as merely a theory: “Let’s not even talk about Coatue specifically,” he told the TBPN hosts. When Business Insider asked whether Coatue Management records its meetings, the hedge fund declined to comment.
Evan Fray-Witzer, an employment lawyer from Boston, said that the legality of Laffont’s idea would vary state by state, but that it would likely be legal if employees were notified in advance as a “condition of employment.” How such recordings would be kept could present another issue, Fray-Witzer said, as storing confidential information in the cloud could create compliance problems.
Laffont didn’t seem intent on the idea of storing the calls, and drew a distinction between transcription and recording. He wasn’t looking for a database of all the call transcripts, he said. Instead, he wanted key takeaways, what was agreed upon, and whether anything was done in violation of compliance.
“I like the option of deleting,” he said.
Fray-Witzer also said that there were many reasons not to record your employees on a strategic level, not a legal one.
“It’ll probably be horrible for employee morale,” he said. “It just has such a Big Brother feel to it.”
Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, was famously a fan of keeping logs, with the firm recording meetings and playing them back to employees in the 2010s. Bridgewater later began taping and keeping fewer meetings, Rob Copeland wrote in his book “The Fund,” on the recommendation of former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick.
Laffont also noted analytics systems were getting better. “They’re going to be able to look at your WhatsApp and your messages and your emails and all of your calls and they’re going to be able to say, ‘Hey, by the way, don’t say this,'” he said.
Many employees are already recording their meetings — not to document bad actors, but to keep notes. AI notetaking agents are all the rage in Zoom and Teams calls, spawning a cottage industry.
Laffont said the idea wouldn’t necessarily be to only penalize employees presenting problematic behavior; the goal would be to set them on a better path.
“Maybe that person, if they had gotten that first warning, might have realized: ‘Oh wait, you’re right, I’m being abusive,'” he said.
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