When COVID-19 Turned Our World Upside Down, We Managed Just Fine

If we’ve learned anything from the COVID-19 outbreak in March, we’ve learned that all of our hard work planning for these kinds of eventualities was time well spent and the teamwork we had within our staff was solid as a rock.

I am a systems specialist for Listerhill Credit Union, a nonprofit financial cooperative owned and operated by its members. We do everything we can to improve the lives of those in our community. Being a financial institution, we were deemed “essential” from moment one. We were suddenly faced with the partial realization that all of the disaster recovery testing protocols we had meticulously put into place were suddenly a reality, and they all snapped together brilliantly.

Even before a lockdown was announced, our suddenly-formed Pandemic Response Team met and proactively sent down the order to get people home. Our IT staff sprang into action to send people home with their computers, increasing the amount of VPN users we had by over 500% in a matter of days. We took our spare pool of PCs that were thought to be expired out of our assets this year and imaged them to become remote desktop portals for back-office employees. I scurried into the UNIX shell of our core to create virtual access points for the network staff, while they fielded tickets coming down from senior staff to send their people home as soon as possible in a fashion that didn’t interrupt operations.

We did our best to socially distance as we met with each of these employees to give them a crash course on the differences between their day-to-day operations and what they were now going to have to do from their own homes. Our hands chapped from so many hand washings after touching so many keyboards, and the smell of Lysol and Clorox wipes replaced the scented candles we typically used to keep our area from smelling like a workshop.

In a matter of two weeks, a quarter of our staff was fully functioning from home; our branches closed their lobbies and operated by appointment only; our freshly-installed SmartATMs serviced our membership in our drive-thrus; and our tellers and member advocates did their best assisting members via video integration with SmartATMs through the glass of the drive-thru windows. Our loss prevention and lending departments spring-boarded a ”Here to Help” initiative to provide extensions and skip-a-payment options for our members who were struggling to pay their loans while out of work and remained waiting for unemployment and stimulus checks to roll in.

Looking back, how was all this accomplished? Besides from having the best team on the planet? One word – organization. We have been using ManageEngine’s ServiceDesk Plus product for years and I can’t sing its praises enough – it really made a monumental task so much more civilized. Our meticulously kept Assets module that I had customized over the years proved indispensable while wrangling all these new devices, as well as helped me avoid IP address conflicts. The Requests module was a high-traffic area for every member of our IT staff as they performed their own parts during the crisis, helping them to communicate with other employees, reply back and forth, put in notes for all to see, and keep the multitude of requests from falling through the cracks. The preventative maintenance tasks kept us on point with our typical duties in the midst of the fallout, so their importance wasn’t ignored. Each department used their own enterprise service management pieces to stay on point with their varied requests while they were miles away from each other.

While we have since reopened our lobbies to half capacity and brought quite a few employees back into the office, it is evident that this crisis is still ongoing. Our new work reality continues behind acrylic sneeze guards, foot-placement mats on floors, gloves for handling cash and people counters at the door, and it will never be as it was. But at Listerhill Credit Union, we continue to strive to find new and better ways to service our membership. We’re using this time to spark innovation and new ways of thinking, and I have never been so proud to be a part of this team. It’s all about “we.”

Leia Powell is a Systems Specialist for Listerhill Credit Union based in Muscle Shoals, Ala.