After passing our 1st anniversary of remote work, many lenders have decided –or are considering — to keep it that way. Reasons range from reducing overhead costs to increased employee work satisfaction to increased work productivity.
While telecommuting’s initial challenges may have been resolved (mostly), lenders are now faced with the challenge of scaling their mortgage business with a remote workforce.
Here is your plan for growing a profitable mortgage business with a telecommuting mortgage team.
Create An Onboarding Plan
The onboarding process helps set the stage for productive and satisfied employees, ultimately helping them succeed and grow your organization. Onboarding remotely, however, can be difficult if the steps or communication channels are unclear.
Help reduce the stress of onboarding by creating a 2 or 3-week plan complete with upcoming orientation meetings, video tutorials, reference materials, and daily schedule. Set up cohorts or have the new employee “shadow” another employee to get them familiar with their virtual office and digital mortgage tools.
Informal chats, ice-breaker sessions, and companywide announcements to welcome and introduce the new member also encourage an emotional connection to the team and your business.
Adopt a New Management Style
The challenge of managing a remote workforce lies mainly in not physically seeing your team at work. Do not falsely believe that you must compensate for this with micromanagement. Not only will burnout ensue, but it will also stunt company growth.
Instead, develop a new management style, one based on trust and accountability, and utilize mortgage business productivity tools to support transparent and independent efficiency. More on tracking and mortgage productivity below.
Invest in Technology: Streamline Productivity & Tracking
A digital mortgage platform is absolutely essential whether working remotely or in-office. However, with a telecommuting mortgage team, you’ll want to implement a platform with features that enable the entire team to collaborate and operate virtually and seamlessly.
In particular, look for a mortgage platform with:
- Loan-specific team chat and note-taking capabilities.
- Auto recordkeeping of communication and the changes taken on the loan file.
- Notifications of updates.
- Checklist creation, task assignment, and auto-reminders.
- Integration with calendars, CRM, and project managers.
- Role-specific access within the portal.
- Secure and cloud-based so it can be accessed anywhere –including tablet or smartphone.
Amp Up Communication
Siloing communication will reduce chatter and confusion. One way is to group conversations by loan file, as mentioned above. But you can also create various channels specific to a department, team, or project.
Some of the most well-known team communication platforms with this capability include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chanty, and Discord. Take your team communication even further by integrating it with your mortgage POS platform.
Virtual stand-ups and regular one-on-one meetings are also great for sharing updates, identifying and removing roadblocks, and making decisions –actions necessary for both team and business growth.
Create a Remote Workforce Culture
Along the lines of better communication is nurturing a sense of community and enthusiasm within your organization. A powerful way to convey this is by showing team members appreciation. Recognize employees with team-wide shoutouts, one-on-one conversations, or even public shoutouts through your social media channels.
Set your team up for sustainable growth by making professional development a priority as well. And don’t limit your mortgage workforce to lender-specific training. Courses in mental health, sales training, time management, and technology are essential for your remote mortgage team’s long-term success.
The Digital Mortgage Platform for Remote Team Success
Scaling a mortgage business with a remote team may have its challenges, but it can also be highly lucrative. Minimizing overhead, eliminating in-office distractions, luring top earners with remote office flexibility, and increasing employee productivity are some of the benefits of having a telecommuting workforce.
But it all starts with implementing an agile and scalable digital mortgage platform. With Loanzify POS, you can provide your remote team with the tools they need to service multiple loans at a time successfully.
Swift digital intake with virtual asset verification and automated doc collection eliminate the most costly and time-consuming operations, so your mortgage team has more time to dedicate to revenue-generating processes that scale your business up.
Plus, the within-platform communication channels and open API allow for a 360 network of collaboration that keeps your team connected to each other, all loan partners, and their borrowers.
Schedule a conversation with an account executive to learn more about the customized solutions for remote mortgage business growth.