Online Meetings are Good
The COVID pandemic has affected us in ways that we have yet to grasp fully. Some are negative, and some are profoundly positive. I want to talk about one of those profound benefits that are online meetings. I know you’re thinking that I must be going crazy or that maybe I’ve already arrived. But no, give me a chance in this post to make the point for online meetings in your company.
Online meetings solve the problem of tribal knowledge preservation. But it is not online meetings alone. It is also the ability to record the meeting and the auto-transcriptions feature and deep search found in Microsoft Stream.
To dig in, I have to take a step back and explain a few things: Tribal Knowledge, Meeting Recordings, and Microsoft Stream.
Tribal Knowledge
In Six Sigma, tribal knowledge is the things known but not yet documented. This process looks to remove all tribal knowledge over time, but it is a never-ending battle. You could say that tribal knowledge is the undocumented collective wisdom that resides as a sum of all the people’s know-how. The problem is that the tribal knowledge is lost when people leave.
Recorded Meetings
All the online meeting services allow you to record your meetings in one form or another. In organizations, the problem is that they don’t have a common location for storing recorded meetings. When you record locally, you run the chance of losing the recording over time. When you record to the cloud, the files become locked behind a password that you have to send around with the link to the recording. In both cases, you don’t get CC or transcription.
MS Teams is a little better because it records to the cloud automatically for you. It also gives you a link that can be shared inside the enterprise. However, it does not yet have transcription either. Although that feature is in the roadmap, it is not yet available as of April 4th, 2021.
Microsoft Stream
Microsoft Stream is an enterprise video service that allows people to store, view, and share videos. This service helps organize video content making it easier for others to find. The most powerful feature found in this service is the automatic transcription and closed captioning. When you upload your video, it starts a process on the backend that passes the video through a transcription AI. It takes about 2x the length of the video for the transcription to be available. Once it is available, it becomes searchable. Additionally, you can add surveys, polls, or quizzes to the video.
Now The Point
Online meetings are the latest way to stay connected. This online space is where the ideas are shared, and the know-how is generated. When we record these meetings, we immortalize the knowledge. However, that’s not enough because it becomes hard to find. That’s where Stream plays the biggest role. When Stream transcribes the video, the spoken words become searchable. At that point, the videos transition to a body of insight.
Training videos become a knowledge base.
Design meetings become tech papers.
Research presentations become research papers.
All of these transcribed videos help the tribal knowledge transition to explicit knowledge.
Best Practice
-
Make an effort to record all your meetings that are relevant to preserve.
-
Ensure that you are following company policies and code of conduct.
-
Remember that someone in the future will be watching it, so be clear.
-
If you’re hosting, make sure that you have a good microphone so that the transcriber can catch everything.
I hope that this has been helpful for you. What are some other ways that you can codify your group’s tribal knowledge?
