Before March 2020, if you surveyed people who have previously never worked from home and asked them if they would like to try it, most of them would be very enthusiastic about it. Not having to deal with the morning commute and nasty weather? Who would say no to this?

COVID-19 gave everyone the opportunity to experience working from home and realize that the adage is still true—the grass is, indeed, greener on the other side.

A new challenging reality

With all the convenience that remote work brings, you will also encounter plenty of challenges, including endless distractions—from routine walks to the fridge to having to take care of the children, and more. You get bombarded with things that require your attention, and your efficiency inevitably dwindles.

Staying connected and organized is the number one challenge that comes with working from home. If you are not used to this environment, you have to figure out processes that apply to your specific situation, whether it’s maybe creating a strict schedule for yourself to imitate normal work life or even working from your car to get some peace and quiet.

The other big challenge is what we at Mortgage Automator call “communication overhead”. When you work in an office, you can ask a colleague a quick question and get the answer you need.

Working remotely, quick questions can take a lot more time. And while nobody really likes to spend time on Zoom meetings, having them with the whole team to clarify uncertainties and remove the bottlenecks will help you reduce the overhead in the end.

Efficient remote management

The best way to keep your team organized and efficient while working remotely is to have a system that tracks tasks and their progress. You will be able to see who is working on what, if there are any potential delays that can affect other tasks, or if something requires your attention.

At the same time, you will be able to overview all the deals in your pipeline and see their status, spending less time in meetings trying to sort this out.

Otherwise, if you don’t keep track of what’s going on in your company, you’re bound to run into problems that will take more time than they should.

These are some of the issues we have been working on eliminating as well. Our team works longer hours now than before the pandemic, but it’s not always clear why some tasks might’ve taken longer than originally planned.

Figuring this out and removing any blocks is important for any company that prioritizes the health and wellbeing of its employees to avoid potential cases of burnout.

Keeping your team spirit up

Working remotely can be a very demotivating experience sometimes, especially for teams that thrive on each other’s energy. Add to that the overall mental stress of the current situation and the team morale can drop extremely low.

There are a lot of online options for fun remote team building activities these days, suitable for teams of any size and budget. If you see that your team’s morale needs a boost, a quick Google search can help you sort it out.

Find the right system to support your business

As an end-to-end loan origination and servicing platform, Mortgage Automator sources new feature ideas from our existing customers, and our roadmap is scheduled for months in advance.

Lenders have been relying heavily on our software during these times as it helps them to stay connected with their team, their investors and borrowers, and keeps them organized, ensuring that none of their documents or processes fall through the cracks.

So, we focused on supporting our customers and quickly releasing features that would help their transition and dealing with new challenges the pandemic crisis brought to them.

For example, most of our customers received payment deferral requests from their borrowers. To help them manage this process more efficiently, we released a deferral request form that lenders can send to their clients when needed.

The form asks the borrower to provide a detailed outline of their situation supported by documentation, thus making sure that borrowers don’t ask for a deferral if they don’t really need it.

Stay organized and carry on

In general, we’ve observed that our private lending customers were able to crisis-proof their businesses with the right organization of their processes. Keeping all your business-related information, files, and loans under one system that you can access from anywhere will enable you to keep on working while everyone else is running around in panic.

If you can get to this point, then it doesn’t matter where you are working. You have access to everything you need; you can reach everyone you need; you can stay on top of your game, and the only thing that’s changed is your location.

Private lending companies that didn’t prioritize the efficiency of their operations before are among the ones hit the hardest right now. They have to go through drastic changes, try to restructure their processes, adapt to a new system, and deal with a lot of stress related to this. Needless to say, their deals will be affected as well.

Process will save you

We don’t know if we can ever go back to our normal office lives. We don’t know how all other aspects of our lives will change. But one thing is certain—if you create scalable and sustainable processes to run your lending business, adapting to those new changes will not be a problem for you.

If you have well-organized internal processes, your loans are all in order and follow the same structure, it will be so much easier for your team to do their work. Adhering to this kind of organization will create transparency in your business and allow you to evaluate and fund loans faster. This means more growth and new heights to conquer. The opportunities are endless, we just have to make sure to seize them.