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The accessibility and development of technology has meant that organisations are now making use of flexible structures, and a remote workforce.

It's likely that your organisation has already, or is adopting a flexible structure to the way employees work and the locations they work from, especially during the pandemic. 

There's a wide range of identified benefits in allowing staff to complete some or all their work remotely, but how to we communicate with the team when they're in numerous locations and an incident hits? 

Remote working is here, it's time for our incident communication to support it

Remote working can increase productivity by allowing employees to work at the time and location that suits their personal style or commitments as well as increasing compliance with the government’s guidance on social distancing.

Target your notifications to only the relevant people and reduce redundant alerts to boost engagement with your incident communications. 

But what does flexible working mean for your communication processes

With a remote workforce, it is harder to ensure that the right people receive the right message when an incident happens, whether that is an IT outage or a cyber incident. This is why targeted notifications are important, and why a multi-channel approach is often worth considering. It may be that your remote team do not have access to the same office telephone system, or even the usual email system if the problem involves IT. Giving users the option of how to receive notifications in case of an incident can skyrocket the level of engagement you receive on alerts as they are likely to only see notifications that are meaningful to them on a channel which is relevant. 

How to improve productivity through your communication channels

Try to include useful and actionable information when you send notifications about an incident, even if it's just to let you know they've been affected by the issue. Include workaround information, but don't presume users will know exactly what to do - provide them with screenshots or links to save confusion. 

Being proactive in trying to reduce alert noise and fatigue can have huge benefits when it comes to boosting engagement from users. Plus, when you provide useful alerts that users want to receive, your brand as an IT service team is greatly improved and this can also help to limit alert fatigue.  

Are you making the most of remote working? Let us know your communication strategy in the comments, or schedule a demo to see how Klaxon can help you improve your communications plan.

Want to learn more? Check out this collection of incident planning articles.