Employee recording of internal meetings: HR guidance and best practices

By James Green

An employee may wish to make a recording of a work meeting, such as a disciplinary or grievance hearing or a meeting with their line manager, for a number of reasons. Generally, this will be in circumstances where the employee feels that they have been treated unfairly and wants either to prevent such treatment or to obtain evidence of it. The employee may think that a recording will provide evidence of unfairness, for example to demonstrate that a grievance meeting was not a genuine attempt to deal with issues that they had raised. Alternatively, the employee may wish to have a full transcript of the meeting for use at the next stage of an internal process or in future litigation.

Employees do not have the legal right to record an internal meeting. Therefore, if an employee asks to record a meeting, the employer must decide whether or not to permit the request.

Employers may be reluctant to allow recordings. However, rather than automatically refusing all requests, it is advisable for them to ask for the employee’s reasons for wishing to record the meeting. The employee may have a disability that would make it difficult for them to take a written note of the meeting. In such circumstance, the employer would need to consider if allowing the employee to record the meeting would be a reasonable adjustment.

Employers should be aware of the potential for employees to record meetings without their knowledge and should consider how to address this risk.

In this guide, learn about:

• Refusing a request from an employee to record a meeting
• Permitting a request from an employee to record a meeting
• Recordings made by the employer
• Reasonable adjustments
• Covert recordings
• The admissibility of covert recordings in employment tribunal proceedings

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