There’s No Going Back Now – and That’s OK

With vaccines widely available and COVID-19 cases dropping in the U.S., many people have begun to emerge from their locked down existence, and it’s been fascinating to hear from people across the credit union industry about the various ways they’re approaching the idea of returning to pre-pandemic life. Just as some vaccinated individuals are taking baby steps back into society (outdoor lunch with a vaccinated friend, a haircut) while remaining cautious, some credit union leaders are continuing to have staff work at home or at least giving them the option to, and still holding events virtually.

Then there’s a whole camp of individuals, vaccinated and not, whose lives are back to business as usual (of course, some of these people ignored the pandemic entirely, but I’ll spare you on my feelings on that) and credit union leaders who are insisting that employees return to the office and are registered for in-person conferences in the coming months. If you’ve read our round-up of remaining 2021 credit union conferences, you’ll see that lots of folks are eager to show up to those hotels and convention centers with bells on.

I personally am in camp number one, but to the credit union leaders in camp number two, I get it. Many employees simply can’t focus when they’re at home or don’t have a proper home office setup to work from. And after over a year of mostly planned virtual interactions, we’re tired of missing out on connecting with others spontaneously in new settings, which not only brings general excitement and fulfillment, but can lead to career advancement.

But given how long our new way of living has lasted, it’s now impossible to go back to normal (if “normal” equates to how we lived life in 2019). We’ve spent so much time developing new routines and habits that going back to our exact pre-pandemic lives would feel like trying to type a text using T9 on a flip phone – inefficient, awkward and outdated.

It’s human nature to resist change and desire returning to a life we knew and were comfortable with, especially when the change was forced upon us unexpectedly, but the changes brought on by this pandemic are inescapable and permanent. And those who accept that, identify how the changes have helped them grow, and plan to incorporate that growth into their lives going forward are those who will have the most success in this next phase.

While conducting interviews for my Focus Report feature for our June print issue, “Employee Growth: An Unplanned Pandemic Side-Effect,” sources shared some positives of operating virtually for an extended period of time that all credit union professionals could benefit from hearing about. One came from Andrea Cooper, director of talent for CUNA Mutual Group, who said that using technology to communicate from different locations helped promote inclusion when it came to sharing information.

“It’s easier when you can just walk up to someone, but I also think that’s often less inclusive, because it depends on who you happen to see and who you happen to talk to in that moment. And then there isn’t always a good consistent experience for everybody who might need to know the information,” she said. “What I’ve liked about the complexity of this virtual world is that I’m not likely to send a message to one team member about something that affects the team, in the way I might have if I just happened to run into one of them in a hallway and said something in the past. It’s forced me to think about, who needs to know this, and who should I involve in this decision or process? I personally hope that’s something we don’t lose, because it’s easy for hallway conversations to be with the people you feel most comfortable with, and often those are the people who are most like you, so you kind of get into this narrow view of the world.”

Cooper also indicated working remotely helped level the playing field for CUNA Mutual employees, regardless of their role. “What I’ve seen is that notion of, we’re all in this together. We’re all humans at the end of the day. I think that has been a really positive shift, and when I think of the future of work, I hope it continues down that path where we start to see [an organization] as a collective, versus that hierarchal view of organizations. Once you see something, you can’t un-see it. We’ve all been in each other’s houses for a year with life happening around us, and now that we know that about each other, we shouldn’t try to pretend when we’re back in the office that we don’t see that full human experience of someone.”

In that same vein, Shelan Stritzke, vice president of human resources for the $1.6 billion, Vancouver, Wash.-based iQ Credit Union, said she noticed the virtual meeting format encouraged some employees to feel less intimidated and open up to one another more. In addition, shifting demands in different areas of the credit union’s business as a result of the pandemic required some employees to learn and perform new job functions (specifically, branch staff supported the call center when call volumes increased). This prompted some to move into new roles they may have not otherwise considered.

“Historically, we didn’t see a lot of branch staff growing their careers in the direction of the call center,” Stritzke said. “But we started cross-training them and they started taking those calls, and when we would have a contact center position open up, suddenly we had a lot of qualified internal applicants in a way that we hadn’t seen before.”

The past 15 months have been overshadowed by one of the most challenging crises of our lifetimes that we’re still not quite on the other side of. Right now, we can all take a step forward by agreeing to leave behind things that weren’t doing anybody any good in the workplace, like executives who act like A-list celebrities and won’t give frontline employees the time of day, office cliques, new hires who look like clones of the last few new hires, and positions that don’t allow employees to learn new skills beyond their original job description. Let’s leave all of that behind along with the practice of coming to work sick and infecting the entire office, eating at buffets, blowing out birthday candles and putting up with close talkers.

And handshakes – didn’t we agree that we were done with the handshake?

Natasha Chilingerian is executive editor for CU Times. She can be reached at nchilingerian@cutimes.com.