Focus On Your Employees to Survive & Thrive

It appears that the COVID-19 crisis will be with us for a while longer. Even with a vaccine on the horizon and improved treatments for the disease, this new normal is challenging credit unions on many fronts. One of the deepest challenges is continuing the strategic planning process effectively, despite facing physical distance and personal employee distress. Organizations that have cultures that foster communication, agility and employee engagement will have the best chances of succeeding in these difficult times.

Even with a vaccine emerging sometime within the next year, your strategic planning must include organizational readiness to face an uncertain future for employees and the business. Your planning must include preparing for scenarios that will have completely differing outcomes. The consequences for both employees and the organization will be completely different if a 75% to 90% effective and widely accepted vaccine becomes available in the early spring versus one that may be less effective and comparable to the annual flu vaccine, which according to the CDC is only about 50% to 60% effective. Challenges also will come from those who refuse to be vaccinated at all.

Pandemic fears may not dissipate quickly and the lingering impact of separation, illness or the passing of loved ones will continue to impact the workforce in a highly disruptive way.  Leadership needs to pay attention to their organizational cultures to listen and learn, and to digest what is truly happening to the workforce and their ability to stay engaged and deliver results. If they were working at 100% capacity before, this percentage has most likely deteriorated for a significant number of people.

Moreover, the pandemic is causing a foggy economic outlook. A recent survey of economists by Bankrate found the group to be fairly evenly divided on whether the economic outlook is positive or negative, and their average projection of U.S. unemployment a year from now is at 7%, approximately double the pre-pandemic level.

Such uncertainty makes strategic planning and human capital planning more difficult. Your organization’s culture remains your most important weapon, and it must be attended to and strengthened now. The best leaders possess the exceptional ability to understand and impact culture. They view culture and leadership as intertwined. In the past, credit union managers have said, “The member always comes first.” In today’s upended environment, smart leaders have now shifted their view to “the employee comes first” as it is employees who provide the basis for satisfying existing members and ensuring that they are well cared for during this stressful time.  It has recently been shared that member and customer loyalty is weaker than ever before, and this relationship must be analyzed and understood from a different perspective than the one that exists today.

Leadership needs to figure out how to engage employees in strategies and how to increase curiosity, agility and action despite the physical distances that have become the norm.  Curiosity underpins the innovation that is needed to address multiple circumstances. Employees need freedom and flexibility to pursue outside-the-box thinking. In this environment, the alternatives they may develop might seem unusual. But unusual options may be just what is required for unusual times. Outreach, asking and listening become the key to ensuring your culture is maintaining open and valuable two-way communication to ensure sustainability and organizational resilience.

With the employee in mind, management’s job is to communicate and over-communicate. Leadership must continually express the organization’s key core values to maintain a healthy culture, now more than ever. Repetition in various forms, including one-on-one conversations, becomes even more critical. Leaders must seek and share the important internal and external feedback gained from employees, members and potential members. Leaders must continually strive to understand how COVID-19 is impacting employees’ roles, responsibilities, goals, ability to perform and member relationships. Leaders need to articulate clear priorities, with distance work becoming the new norm, combined with strains on employees’ ability to focus.

The coronavirus is allowing difficult lessons about resiliency and adaptability to surface, as individuals and organizations deal with this uncertain situation that is most likely not going away anytime soon. Recognizing the critical opportunity to strengthen your credit union’s culture while simultaneously creating resourceful solutions to the problems that COVID-19 has created is of ultimate importance to the survival of your organization. Working together, leadership and employees can develop solutions that provide the agility needed to weather this storm. This uncertainty is likely to become the new normal. Organizations that stay deeply connected to their employee base, encouraging them to contribute and move forward, are those that will thrive and survive.

Stuart R. Levine is Chairman and CEO for Stuart Levine & Associates and EduLeader LLC in Miami Beach, Fla.