PHILADELPHIA—One credit union that formed a task force in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic said it is now playing a pivotal role as the CU reopens.
Ardent Credit Union told CUToday.info the task force has made a big difference in its ability to seamlessly pivot to a remote operation, keep employee motivation and confidence high in the organization, and communicate with teams to create a “sense of calm” throughout the cooperative.
Many of those benefits are expected to make reopening Ardent free of hurdles and unexpected issues, according to CEO Rob Werner.
“The task force has developed a five-phase approach to reopening,” Werner said. “We are in phase one now.”
Werner said the $781-million Ardent CU responded quickly to address COVID-19 concerns—and even had its task force ready as early as February.
“We were ready with our task force well before COVID-19 cases hit Pennsylvania. We all knew cases would be coming, and we knew we had to be prepared and have a team in place to help us deal with the crisis,” said Werner, who noted the team of more than 10 included staff from all areas of the organization.
The Big Concern
The biggest concern early, as was the case with many credit unions, was how would the organization become a virtual shop fairly quickly, said Werner.
“Over the course of three weeks we went from maybe about a handful of people working remotely to about 85 people doing so,” said Werner. “And we have been working very well this way, right from the start.”
The CEO said the credit union would not have had the success it has with its new remote workforce had it not had a task force in place to carefully plan for the drastic changes in business it knew was coming, and then aligned all areas of the company during the shift. As CUToday.info has reported, many credit unions that made the transition to a virtual workforce in a shorter period of time and with less planning faced problems early on, such as bandwidth and connectivity issues.
The Ardent task force created a plan to transition the workforce to working from home stages.
“We took those weeks to get staff comfortable with the move, check systems to make sure our servers were balancing OK, and avoid any unexpected issues,” said Werner. “That likely has made the biggest difference in all of this. So when the state began shutting down we were ready, with any small glitches in the new process behind us.”
Members of the Team
The task force includes Werner and his entire senior management team.
Rob Werner
“That means my chief lending officer, chief financial officer, chief people officer, chief marketing officer, head of service and sales, and my chief technology officer,” said Werner. “I also included my risk team of three, as I want to make sure risk has a voice in all the decisions the task force makes. And we have our entire IT staff.”
The task force now meets weekly, but before the pandemic hit and in the first month of the crisis Werner said the group met two to three times a week.
“The task force has done so much for us,” said Werner. “One things we do is have every area report in on the health of their teams, so we all know what is going on. Staying connected this way provides the credit union with a barometer on the status of the organization.”
Werner said without that barometer it would have been much more difficult to make the swift decisions it had to make during the course of the crisis.
“And the fact that our entire employee base knows there's a task force in place constantly looking at everything we're doing, seeing how we can improve things and ensure our employees’ safety delivers a level of calm to organization needed in these times,” he said.
The Reopening Plan
Werner explained the task forces’ plan to reopen its six public-facing offices—it has two locations inside SEGs, including a unique, first-of-its-kind compact Cube location.
The plan includes first addressing offices in which member access has been limited, such as those without drive-thrus, working with branches that let members in via appointment only, and then fully reopening. All along in the process Ardent will carefully establish proper social distancing and set up protective features, such as plexiglass shields.
“That's how we will roll this out over the next couple months,” Werner said.