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Closing the communication loop with your team can improve productivity, reduce downtime and improve employee morale, but what is a communication loop and how do you close it?

When sending out communications to your team which require a response you are opening up a communications loop, and when responses do not arrive in a timely manner (or at all) that can cause problems for your incident management, your service desk and your business continuity.

One of the biggest challenges in a crisis or emergency situation is accurately and clearly communicating your objectives. This can include a description of the current problem or situation, any workarounds and an expected resolution. An objective could also be to ascertain how many people are affected so that your team can implement a workaround or fix targeted to those people and to potentially help them find a fix.

From there, it is important to have natural and regular follow-up points that are relevant to the situation. If your communication requires a response but one has not been received, it would make sense to include a follow-up point which asks those users who have not responded to respond, potentially via a different channel to ensure they have not missed your communication. It could also be an update on the situation (whether it requires a response or not) to ensure that your team feels connected and informed throughout the process, and of course following up once the incident or situation is resolved to let your team know the outcomes or to invite them to let you know whether the issue has been fixed for them.

It is important when offering your team a response option that it is presented in such a way that it is easy and accessible to them, so offering different channels and response types can be a key part in increasing engagement with notifications and closing the loop when it comes to communications, and giving your team the power to choose how and where they are notified can help them feel empowered by your communications rather than feeling like it has been forced on them.

Closed-loop communication can take some time to perfect, especially where responses form part of that loop, so it is important to ensure that you have records of the communications you have sent and to go over this after an incident to identify areas of weakness or areas where improvements can be made.

How do you deal with closed-loop communications where a response is required?

Why not book a demo to see how our platform can help you overcome your unique communication challenges and enable you to close the loop.