What did we learn about working and managing remotely during COVID-19?

There’s always been something of a butts-in-seats workplace mentality in the private lending industry. And it makes sense. When you are dealing with sensitive client information, it can be hard to ensure security and know where everything stands operationally if your employees aren’t physically present in your office.

Enter COVID-19. You know how that went. Almost overnight, we were all all scrambling to move our businesses to the cloud (or at least make them accessible off-site). Under different circumstances, most employees would say that working from home would be the ideal environment. But amid the stress of the pandemic and the chaos of kids and other family members being confined at home too, the adage  the grass is  greener on the other side proved true.

What did this emergency scramble to shelter-in-place and work remotely teach us, and what should we think about bringing back into an office setting as the crisis (hopefully) draws to a close?

Things We’re Glad Will Stay at Home
Staying connected with your team is the No.1 challenge of remote work // Networking just works better in person, and remote work can be really isolating. Aside from the fact that humans are social creatures, “communication overhead” can slow any team down. Quick questions for a colleague become a laborious wait for an email response, an uphill struggle to get all the detail into a chat, or an awkward phone call for something that doesn’t quite feel worthy of a call.

There’s a real distance to technology, and although there are solutions to some of the symptoms (looking at you, endless Zoom meeting that helps as much as it hurts), companies considering the possibility of letting employees permanently work from home must weigh the long-term effects.

Remote work is kind of … remote // Back to humans being social creatures. Remote work can be very demotivating, especially for high-powered teams that thrive on each other’s energy. The overall mental stress of the pandemic will fade, but employees who move to permanent remote work may still struggle to keep their morale up.

Fortunately, we have the pandemic to thank for the prevalence of some fun team-building activities beyond the cheese and gimmicks of the past. Some of these (e.g., Google “virtual team building activities” to send yourself down a rabbit hole) are worth bringing into an office environment.

How the Pandemic Made Us Better
The fear of every boss who suddenly didn’t have butts-in-seats as a way to track work ethic is by now (hopefully) permanently laid to rest. If they weren’t using them already, during the stay-at-home orders, most private lenders began implementing systems to track tasks and progress, find bottlenecks and create checks-and-balances to prevent things from falling through the cracks.

The pandemic was something of a boon for these platforms. Lenders who had previously been content to keep things on paper (in the dreaded Excel spreadsheet!) or spread over multiple systems realized they needed to organize their processes, increase efficiency and implement tracking so their remote work teams could get things done. The side benefit is these systems work just as well back in an office environment (and help crisis-proof the future). They also allow lenders to both sustain their processes and scale to take advantage of new opportunities in a post-pandemic market.

Many end-to-end loan origination and servicing platforms allow lenders to overview all deals in a pipeline along with their status, manage documents and billing, report to investors and much more. The ability to keep all information, files and loans in one system accessible from anywhere was suddenly of paramount importance during the pandemic. And if they didn’t have them already, smart servicing platforms launched features to allow borrowers to easily make deferral requests and provide documentation to support their case.

As with any drastic change, the pandemic put under a microscope how private lenders managed their daily operations. So many external forces—economic stress, forced shutdown, new remote work, families at home, worries about potential illness—created a crucible that showed us what we were made of. Coming out the other side is its own win, but bringing the good we learned out of it makes businesses stronger and more adaptable against future crises.

We don’t know if we will ever go back to our normal office lives. We don’t know if—or how—other aspects of our lives will change. But one thing is certain: If you create scalable and sustainable processes to run your lending business, adapting to those new changes will not be a problem.