Information isn't just power. It's the literal glue of a functioning office. When people feel like they’re the last to know about a project shift or a new hire, they don't just get annoyed. They stop caring. I've seen it happen in massive corporate towers and tiny three-person startups where the "loop" is more like a tangled ball of yarn.
The phrase they're kept in the loop sounds like corporate jargon, but it’s actually the pulse of psychological safety at work.
Think about the last time you found out about a major company change via a LinkedIn post from a coworker instead of an internal memo. It feels like a gut punch. You’re an outsider in your own job. Harvard Business Review has spent years digging into this, and the data is pretty bleak: transparency is directly tied to employee retention. People don't leave bad jobs as often as they leave "black hole" environments where information goes in but never comes back out to the front lines.
The Psychology of Being Left Out
Our brains are wired to treat social exclusion—like being left out of a meeting—similarly to physical pain.
When employees feel they're kept in the loop, their amygdala stays calm. They can focus on creative problem-solving because they aren't wasting mental energy wondering if they’re about to be fired or if their project is being scrapped behind closed doors. Transparency isn't about dumping every single email into a public Slack channel. That’s just noise. Real transparency is about relevance.
Dr. Amy Edmondson, a Novartis Professor at Harvard Business School, literally wrote the book on this with The Fearless Organization. She argues that "teaming" requires a constant flow of shared information. If a junior developer knows a piece of code is buggy but doesn't feel they’re in the loop enough to speak up, the whole system fails.
Why "Need to Know" is Actually a Trap
Managers love the "need to know" basis. It feels efficient. It feels like you're protecting your team from unnecessary stress or "meeting fatigue."
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But here’s the kicker: humans are meaning-making machines.
If you don't give your team the full story, they will invent one. And the invented story is almost always worse than the reality. If a manager stays silent about a dip in quarterly revenue, the team doesn't think "Oh, they're just busy." They think "Layoffs are coming in December."
Staying "in the loop" acts as a guardrail against the office rumor mill, which is the most expensive and least accurate communication tool in your company.
Practical Ways to Ensure They're Kept in the Loop
So, how do you actually do this without spent 40 hours a week in Zoom calls?
You have to build systems that work while you're sleeping. Asynchronous communication is the hero here. Tools like Notion, Linear, or even a well-organized Monday.com board allow for "passive looping."
- The Friday 15: Spend fifteen minutes at the end of every week writing a bulleted list of what happened, what changed, and what’s coming. Send it to the whole team. No fluff.
- Open Project Docs: Unless it’s a legal or HR issue, make the documentation public within the company.
- The "Why" Filter: Every time you assign a task, explain the context. Don't just say "update this spreadsheet." Say "we’re updating this because the VP needs to see our churn rate before the board meeting on Tuesday."
It’s about the why, not just the what. When people understand the stakes, they feel invested. They feel like part of the inner circle.
The Cost of Communication Silos
I once worked with a logistics firm that was losing nearly $200,000 a month in "avoidable errors."
When we audited their process, the issue wasn't the software or the drivers. It was the dispatchers. They weren't being told when client contracts changed. The sales team would sign a new deal with specific delivery requirements, but that information stayed in a CRM that the dispatchers couldn't access.
Because they weren't kept in the loop, they kept shipping the old way. It took six months for anyone to realize the two departments weren't even talking.
This happens in every industry. In healthcare, it’s called a "handover error," and it can be fatal. In software, it leads to "feature creep" or building things that nobody actually asked for.
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Communication is a cost center if you do it wrong, but a massive profit driver if you do it right.
Identifying the "Information Gatekeeper"
Every office has one.
This is the person who hoards information like a dragon hoards gold. They think that being the only person who knows how a specific system works makes them indispensable. In reality, they are a bottleneck.
If your organization relies on one person to ensure they're kept in the loop, you have a single point of failure.
True leadership involves delegating information. You want to be the person who builds the pipes, not the person who controls the faucet. If you're a manager and your team is constantly asking "Wait, when did this happen?", you are likely the gatekeeper, even if you don't mean to be.
Moving Beyond the Weekly Sync
The "Weekly Sync" is where productivity goes to die.
Most of these meetings are just people reading status updates that could have been an email. If you want to make sure your people feel they're kept in the loop, you need to switch to "exception-based reporting."
Tell them the baseline. Then, only meet when something deviates from that baseline.
This respects everyone's time while ensuring that the critical updates actually land. Use Loom for quick video walk-throughs of new designs. Use Slack Huddles for five-minute "gut checks."
Stop treating communication like a scheduled event and start treating it like a continuous stream.
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Actionable Steps for Radical Transparency
If you feel like your team is drifting or that information is getting stuck in the middle management layers, start here tomorrow morning:
- Audit your "Locked" folders. Ask yourself if that strategy deck really needs to be private. Usually, the answer is no. Open it up.
- Schedule a "Town Hall" with a twist. Don't present. Just take questions. If people aren't asking questions, it’s because they don't trust that they’ll get an honest answer. Fix that first.
- Implement a "Loop Back" policy. When a project finishes, have a 20-minute debrief. What did we learn? Who didn't have what they needed?
- Normalize "I don't know yet." Sometimes you can't keep people in the loop because there is no loop yet. Tell them that. "We are still deciding on the budget for Q3, and I'll have an update by Friday." That is infinitely better than silence.
The goal isn't perfection. It's consistency. When people know that the information will eventually reach them, they stop panicking. They stop checking their backs. They just do the work.
Making sure they're kept in the loop isn't a "nice to have" HR initiative. It’s the difference between a team that survives and a team that actually wins.