In a crisis, do you know where your people are?

When the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide ground stop on November 13, my first thoughts were about the thousands of travelers suddenly stranded across the country. But as the CEO of 8x8, I also had another concern. We have employees who travel regularly for business, and I wanted to know whether any of them were affected, whether they were safe, and whether they needed help getting home. So we initiated a global employee headcount to find out.

Now, here's what's interesting. Reaching our employees wasn't actually that difficult. We're a technology company, our employees are largely knowledge workers, and we use our own communications products every day. We have the tools, the connectivity, and the familiarity with modern communications that make reaching people relatively straightforward. Our bigger challenge was figuring out how to help the people who were affected, particularly when airline, hotel, and rental car systems were being overwhelmed.

But the experience got me thinking about something much bigger. We actually had it relatively easy. What would this have looked like if we had thousands of employees working in warehouses, retail stores, manufacturing facilities, or out in the field? What if a significant portion of our workforce didn't have corporate email addresses, company laptops, or access to the collaboration applications we rely on every day? Suddenly, even figuring out who was affected becomes a much more difficult problem.

The people that communications systems forgetlink to this section

Most companies have invested heavily in internal communications. Email, collaboration applications, employee portals, and plenty of other tools designed to keep employees informed and connected. For knowledge workers, these systems generally work reasonably well. But that doesn't mean they work for everyone, and in many industries, a substantial portion of the workforce operates outside these traditional communications environments.

Think about the employee working in a warehouse, the driver making deliveries, the nurse moving between patients, the retail associate on the store floor, or the technician repairing equipment in the field. Many of these employees don't have corporate email addresses or company laptops, and some don't even have regular access to the applications their employers use to communicate. I sometimes think of these people as digital orphans, not because they're any less important, but because the systems we've built often leave them out.

And this isn't a small issue. These are often the employees closest to customers, physical operations, and the day-to-day delivery of services. They're essential to keeping businesses running, yet when something unexpected happens, they can be among the hardest people to reach. That seems like a pretty significant gap in how we've designed enterprise communications.

This was just the crisis of the daylink to this section

There's another point I think is particularly important. It's easy to look at the aviation ground stop and conclude that this is primarily a problem for airlines, travelers, and companies whose employees spend a lot of time on business trips. A retailer or manufacturing company might reasonably say that most of its employees aren't flying around the country, so why should this matter to them?

But that's missing the bigger picture. The aviation disruption was simply the crisis of the day. The next one could be a hurricane, a flood, a wildfire, a cybersecurity incident, an act of terrorism, or a significant infrastructure failure. We don't know what the next crisis will be, where it will happen, or which employees will be affected. What we do know is that unexpected events happen regularly, and every organization has a responsibility to be prepared.

Imagine a major weather event affecting several company locations. Employees may be at home, traveling to work, or already on site. Some may have lost internet access, others may be dealing with power outages, and still others may need immediate assistance. Sending an email or posting a message in a collaboration application isn't going to be particularly useful if the people who need that information can't access either one.

Or consider a cybersecurity incident that takes down the very corporate systems employees normally use to communicate. How do you reach everyone when your primary communications channels are unavailable? How do you tell employees what systems are safe to use, what actions they should take, and how they should report problems? And how do you know whether the message actually reached them?

These are not hypothetical questions from a technology perspective. They're real operational challenges that organizations need to plan for, and the answers cannot depend entirely on the systems that might be unavailable during the crisis itself.

Imagine accounting for your entire workforce in minuteslink to this section

Let's return to our experience during the aviation disruption. We needed to understand who was affected and who required assistance. Now imagine conducting that same exercise across thousands of employees, including people without corporate devices or email accounts. Instead of organizing a series of phone calls, emails, and manual check-ins, what if you could initiate that process with a single action?

Every employee could receive a text message saying, "We're checking on employees following today's disruption. Are you safe and unaffected? Reply 1 if you're okay, or 2 if you need assistance." The system would automatically capture their responses, identify those requiring help, and record who had acknowledged the message. For employees who don't respond, it could automatically follow up through WhatsApp, then initiate a telephone call or escalate to an appropriate manager if necessary.

The important part is that the communications process doesn't end when the first message goes out. It branches based on the response and continues until the appropriate follow-up actions have been taken. And throughout the process, the organization maintains an auditable record of who was contacted, who responded, when they responded, and who still needs attention. Instead of simply knowing that 10,000 messages were sent, leadership can understand how many employees have been accounted for and where assistance is required.

That's a fundamentally different way of thinking about employee communications. It isn't simply about broadcasting information. It's about creating a coordinated, measurable response across multiple channels, including channels employees actually have access to, and making sure nobody is overlooked because they happen to work outside the traditional corporate environment.

This is why we built 8x8 Resolvelink to this section

At 8x8, we've developed a solution called Resolve to address exactly these kinds of challenges. 8x8 Resolve brings together text messaging, WhatsApp, voice, and automated communications workflows so organizations can reach employees quickly, including those without corporate email addresses or company devices. But the real value isn't simply the ability to communicate across different channels. It's the ability to coordinate those communications, capture responses, automatically follow up, and provide leadership with a clear picture of what's happening.

Resolve enables organizations to create branching communications workflows based on employee responses. Someone who confirms they're safe can be recorded as accounted for, while someone requesting assistance can be directed into a different process. If an employee doesn't respond to a text message, the system can escalate through other available communications channels, creating a structured sequence of attempts to establish contact. And the entire process can be recorded, creating an auditable history of the organization's response.

That last point is particularly important. During an emergency, sending a message doesn't mean someone received it, and receiving it doesn't mean they understood or acknowledged it. Organizations need to distinguish between those different outcomes. They also need employees to be able to communicate back, report an issue, and request assistance. Effective crisis communications isn't a one-way broadcast. It's a conversation supported by processes that help organizations respond appropriately.

Knowing someone needs help is only the beginninglink to this section

Our own experience during the aviation disruption reinforced another important lesson. Even though we could reach our employees, coordinating assistance wasn't always straightforward. We still depended on airlines, hotels, rental car providers, and other organizations whose systems were under tremendous pressure. We could identify the problem, but resolving it required working across different systems and service providers, many of which were struggling with the sudden increase in demand.

This highlights an important distinction. Reaching someone is not the same as resolving their problem. Modern crisis communications should connect directly with the workflows needed to take action. If an employee needs assistance, the right team should be notified, the request should be tracked, updates should flow back to the employee, and the organization should know whether the issue was actually resolved.

This is where the combination of cloud communications, automation, and artificial intelligence creates an even larger opportunity. Organizations can use the information coming back from employees to identify patterns, prioritize resources, coordinate assistance, and respond more effectively. And because these capabilities can operate across voice, messaging, and other communications channels, employees don't need to understand or navigate a collection of disconnected systems simply to get help.

At 8x8, this reflects the broader direction we're taking our communications platform. We don't want to simply help organizations send more messages or make more calls. We want to help them turn communications into intelligence, coordinate action, and deliver meaningful outcomes for the people depending on them.

The metric that really matterslink to this section

I'm increasingly convinced that we measure too many things that don't matter and not enough things that do. In crisis communications, the number of messages sent is an interesting statistic, but it isn't the measure of success. I'd much rather know how many minutes it took to account for every employee, how many people needed assistance, and how quickly we identified those who required help. Those are the outcomes that tell us whether our systems are actually working.

And this is something every business should be thinking about, regardless of industry. The next crisis isn't necessarily going to involve business travel, and the people most affected might be the employees least connected to traditional corporate systems. Whether the disruption comes from weather, infrastructure, cybersecurity, or a physical security threat, the underlying challenge remains the same: can you reach your people, confirm their status, and coordinate the assistance they need?

Preparedness is a leadership responsibilitylink to this section

In my previous post, I wrote about how the aviation ground stop exposed two different problems: the infrastructure failure that caused the disruption and the challenges airlines faced communicating with customers afterward. The same principle applies internally. We can't control every external event or prevent every system failure, but we can control how prepared our organizations are to respond.

For us at 8x8, the aviation disruption was a reminder of the importance of having the right communications capabilities in place before something goes wrong. We were fortunate that our workforce was relatively easy to reach, but I know that's not the reality for many organizations. And I certainly wouldn't want any business to discover during an emergency that a substantial portion of its workforce is effectively invisible to its communications systems.

So here's a question I'd encourage every business leader to ask their team: If something unexpected happened tomorrow, how many minutes would it take us to account for every employee, including those without corporate email or laptops? And once we knew who needed help, how quickly could we do something about it?

I'd be interested in hearing how other organizations are approaching this challenge, particularly those with large frontline or distributed workforces. There's a tremendous opportunity to learn from one another and rethink how we prepare for the unexpected.

Because business resilience isn't just about keeping technology running. It's about making sure we can reach our people, understand what they need, and help them when it matters most.