Remembering the importance of connection, especially in difficult times

Over the past week, our team was fortunate to be invited to two events that underscored the value of connection—from two distinct, but related, vantage points: the importance of staying connected to our colleagues and industry peers, and the importance of staying connected to our community.

The paramount importance of staying connected to colleagues

Tuesday, Dale and I caught an early flight out to Atlanta to spend a day at ICE Mortgage Technology's (IMT) 2022 Sales and Service meeting—their first in-person gathering for sales and service team members since before the pandemic.

Unsurprisingly, we heard so many IMT team members share throughout the event just how meaningful it was to be with their colleagues IRL (in real life).

We even felt the buzz from that sense of being together!

Over the past 18 months, our team has worked closely with members of IMT's demand, growth, and product marketing teams on various thought leadership campaigns—entirely remotely. So, it truly felt special to see the faces we've come to know through Zoom, to be able to shake hands and hug shoulders, and to chat organically—without the distraction of emails, slack notifications, and the rest.

While WFH (work-from-home) and hybrid office environments have a permanent place in post-pandemic work, the importance of keeping team members connected remains paramount. While meaningful collaboration is certainly possible working remotely, it's no doubt hampered when team members feel (or even measurably are) disconnected from one another.

Which leads me to this question:

How are you staying connected with fellow team members? Or facilitating team member connection?

At Mortgage Champions, we've admittedly struggled to meet the demand of the market while maintaining meaningful connection between team members.

Slack has been integral to facilitating quick communication, aligning team members around priorities, and even blowing off steam with much-needed, perfectly-timed GIFs and memes... but we've struggled to find the time and allocate the resources needed to host regular-enough on-sites, let alone daily touch points and weekly recaps.

Despite those struggles, we've had two banner years since the onset of the pandemic; but, connection isn't just about immediate results. We know that in order to sustain long-term growth, we have to continually fight for a sense of connectedness, purposeful work, and greater impact than just bottomline results.

The business case for staying connected to industry peers

If you've been in mortgage for even just a few years, you know the sprawl of this industry. But it can be easy in the every day to become hyper-focused on our niches—and that's not an inherently bad thing. Focusing on doing what you do better every day is essential to becoming one of the best in your field. That said, creating space to step back from your role, your company, even your vertical, can be incredibly eye-opening and foster ideas for growth and innovation in your specific space.

As a learning and development (L&D) company, we could easily benchmark our services against what other L&D companies are (or aren't) doing—but that would hinge our corporate success and relevancy on the premise that the L&D industry, in and of itself, is innovative. Instead, we constantly survey the broader business to compare our current services and customer experience against leading orgs in all different verticals.

Spending time with two leading tech companies within the financial services and lending industries this past week was a refresher on just how much there is to learn from peers in our industry—even those with a completely different product and business model than ours.

At the end of the day, staying connected to professionals at exceptional organizations—especially, though not necessarily, in our industry—can be deeply informative exercise, but it requires a willingness to be open-minded, to be confident enough to ask penetrating questions, and the diligence to write and think about how what others are doing well could impact your business in the short- and long-term.

One last thought in this: when we, as industry, stay connected to and are willing to learn from one another, there should be a perpetual tilt toward collaboration and innovation, making both our individual companies and broader industry stronger, more-resilient, and ultimately more profitable.

The purpose-giving impact of staying connected to our community

Earlier this month, our team was honored to be included in Sales Boomerang's first-ever #WorthwhileWebinar —part of their Boomerang Effect initiative to better businesses in the mortgage industry and our community at large.

While the webinar, led by Alex Kutsishin, Dale Vermillion, and Scott Payne, mainly focused on handling and converting opportunities (catch the full replay here), the Sales Boomerang team dedicated time during the session to share about the work we've been undertaking at Mortgage Professionals Providing Hope (MPPH) since 2006.

At a time when most vendors, lenders, and loan officers are battening down the hatches, it was incredibly refreshing to see the importance of giving back elevated. And here's the truth, when we all come together to make a difference, the individual contribution doesn't have to be grandiose. A little goes a long way when the effort is multiplied by tens, hundreds, or even thousands!

But even still, is now really the time to be talking about giving back? I'd argue yes, and not just because when the economy is contracting there's a rise in child hungry, familial homelessness, and suicide—which is only made worse by the fact that charitable giving typically declines, making it harder for related nonprofits to respond—but because more than ever, employees need to feel a strong sense of purpose in their work to remain committed and motivated in hard times.

Research shows that employees who work for companies with a defined charitable commitment feel greater loyalty to the organization, and that employees who are invited to participate in that charitable impact (through giving and volunteering) are not just happier at work, but more productive.

In a similar vein, an increasing share of consumers, when asked to pick between brands offering a comparable product or service, are significantly more likely to buy from brands they perceive to have a greater commitment to social impact.

If I told you there was a simple strategy to improve employee and customer loyalty at a time where employee and customer retention is arguably one of the most important metrics to your success, wouldn't you be champing at the bit to know what it is? Well, staying connected to your community, involving your employees in social impact campaigns, and sharing that impact with your customers—especially in hard times—is a proven way to invest in employee and customer loyalty when you need it most.

But even knowing that, let's not lose sight of the fact that giving back and staying connected to our community are so much more than just strategies to improve the bottom line—both take us beyond the walls (physical or virtual) of our businesses, remind us of what truly matters in life, and give in us a healthy dose of reality, reminding us just how fortunate we are to have careers, houses, cars, and the daily comforts we so often take for granted.

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