The Zoom prayer meeting was normally attended by about 20 of us from church.
Then a fresh person signed in.
We didn’t recognise the name.
Never turned his camera on. Claimed to be in hospital.
Red flag.
Wanted to pray with our female youth worker.
Big red flag.
But this was an open prayer group.
So, we admitted him with precautions. Never in a breakout room with just one person. Never with young females.
After a few sessions, he disappeared. Maybe he was healed. Maybe he got the message.
This incident came to mind when I saw that the Co-Op now insists employees have their cameras on for all online meetings and bans AI notetakers.
Sensible stuff. Firms have a responsibility to ensure that their meeting protocols are robust.
Not just to guard against reputational damage, but also to ensure that their business is not financially compromised. Let’s look at some of the risks.
Employee safety
If you don’t know who’s in your online meeting, you put your employees at risk from stalkers, vindictive exes, or criminals. Just checking the name is on the payroll is not enough. It’s perfectly fair to expect cameras to be on, at least for a round-the-screen welcome at the beginning of the meeting. Is this who you think it is?
If you record the meeting, do you always stop recording if someone wants to share something sensitive? If so, do you expect them to ask or will you do it automatically? Many firms record the presentations, so people who miss out can catch up, but do not save the questions and follow-up discussion. That’s the safest bet.
Recording the whole online meeting requires a robust consent procedure. Would yours satisfy a judge? The Employee Rights Bill compels employers to take all reasonable steps to prevent harassment in the workplace. That includes online threats to staff working from home.
Cyber-security
The rise of AI notetakers seemed like a godsend for an online meeting. No more frantic typing or summarising. Yippee.
Such devices bring about a host of opportunities for fraud. For starters, is the source secure and reliable? The last thing you want is hackers to use this to infiltrate your organisation and the other devices on the call.
Secondly, is the tool training itself on your business information? That’s before you even start to think about where the report is being stored, who can access it and how secure that server is.
Worst of all, could there be a data breach?
Confidentiality
One of the biggest risks can occur if you are sharing the notes or recording with people outside your organisation.
If your client confidential discussions are available online, however secure they appear, there is a chance the data will be hacked or abused.
Organisations are increasingly restricting or banning the use of commercial, especially, free notetakers. Some are creating their own, controlled notetakers using more secure and trusted partners.
You may find there are safer technical solutions to this issue. I have highlighted some of the risks; before investing in proprietary apps, it’s best to get specialist advice from your cyber-security consultants and your lawyers.
For SMEs, there is no safer way to protect your staff, systems and business data than by the meeting chair to take their own notes to share, giving a redacted summary to external parties. I always went through our agency meeting reports removing anything I felt was unnecessary or contentious before sending them to clients. The other thing about human recorders is that we have to prioritise what to get down, so a lot of irrelevant waffle goes in one ear and out the other.
Less is, as so often, more.
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Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash