People Helping People … It’s Not Just For Members
by Christine Clark, Conversion Analyst
Serving members, working with clients, and coordinating with vendors is, for most of us, daily life. We like to think that any struggles we have are with the ‘outsiders’ and not within our own organization…. After all, we’re all on the same team, right? We have the same common goals: to provide excellent service, deliver solid products, and be the one that everyone turns to when they’re in need.
When you spend a minimum of 40 hours a week with your coworkers, there will be differences of opinion, communication struggles, and stress. Everyone is trying to deliver, but sometimes working together can be challenging. How do you deal with these issues, and what can you do to minimize them?
It’s all about communication and how the message is delivered.
Let’s examine this scenario:
Your credit union is implementing the Enhanced Lending Application, or ELA. Being the smart project lead that you are, you’ve included team members from multiple areas of the credit union to ensure that a well-rounded team of subject matter experts are involved for the delivery of a new, streamlined process. You have included Lending, Member Services, and IT staff members. Everyone is very excited to offer this new lending product that will not only help your members, but also your staff.
You assign the following tasks to your team to begin your project:
- The Lending staff is going to be responsible for providing a list of your loan products, approval tiers, and interest rates
- The IT staff will then take that information and configure it into ELA
- The Member Services staff will then test the setup
Somewhere along the way, the Lending staff failed to deliver the interest rates to the IT staff.
The IT staff sets up as much of the configuration as they can but without the interest rates, the Member Services staff will not be able to fully test, and they will likely miss their testing deadline.
Do you expect your IT staff to:
- Go back to the Lending folks and inquire about the missing interest rates?
- Report the poor delivery to you, the project lead, so you can get with the Lending staff about the missing interest rates?
What may seem like a simple choice can change the demeanor of the whole project, making the rest of the implementation either pleasant or quite challenging:
- If the IT staff works directly with the Lending staff to acquire the missing info, then they’re working as a team to resolve the issue.
- If they report the issue to you to handle, they’ve now potentially created a rift in the team matrix because they ‘reported it to the lead’ instead of going directly to the Lending staff for resolution.
We are all familiar with this common occurrence. When there is workplace conflict, do you expect your employees to resolve issues amongst themselves, or do you prefer that all matters be brought to managers and team leads? As you expect your staff to know your members, you should also know your staff.
Issues can be resolved with a friendly chat between the staff who are working together on a project. Once an issue is ‘brought to the boss’ then it has the potential to become a bigger problem. It could open the door for staff to feel like they are being ‘tattled on’ and this can damage a team environment.
So how should issues like this be handled? Generally speaking, most of your staff are adults who can run their respective areas of your financial institution. Therefore, they ought to be able to resolve their own internal issues.
- Set an expectation with your staff to work together as a group to resolve issues.
- If you have a special project going on and you prefer that all issues be reported to you, then communicate that to everyone.
- Remind your staff that it’s not personal. If something is missing, incorrect, or being questioned, it’s not necessarily because the person being questioned is a bad employee. Everyone has an incredible amount of work that they are responsible for on a daily basis. As much as we strive to do our best, we’re still human and things are going to get missed, forgotten, or set up incorrectly. The common goal is still the same: deliver the best products and services. Sometimes that means working together to get it done while working through differences.
- If attempting to resolve issues amongst themselves isn’t successful, invite your staff to set up a meeting with all parties for a neutral, fact only, discussion to help get resolution. This may also mean that others will need to pitch in and ‘pull more weight’ to help over-burdened coworkers that are unable to fulfill their tasks.
Credit unions thrive on the ‘people helping people’ philosophy. Shouldn’t that be an internal driver as well? Everything outlined above for a successful project is just that – people helping people. We all want to take great pride in our careers and what we do at our jobs, and we will be successful when we simply focus on helping people.