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61 single day," Mobilia said. Cherry Creek implemented several management programs and management- development programs that have helped manage the remote workforce. Seehausen said, "Our view is that we would like to have an environment where people are back in the office. But we are respecting what we're hearing, which ranges from 'I love to work from home' to 'I can't wait to get back to the office.'" MANAGING ISOLATION Like other mortgage companies, Embrace Mortgage shifted to video streaming for management/staff meetings, opting to utilize Microsoft Teams (Zoom and Google Hangouts are other popular choices in the industry). "I think that helped ease the situation," Mobilia said. "While I can't come up to you and ask you how your day was yesterday or this morning, I can see you on a video, and I've learned to read the emotions of my teammates through video." However, the video meetings tend to run longer than in-office meetings, Mobilia said. To avoid that, she said it's essential to have a focused meeting agenda. She schedules her thrice-weekly meetings with her groups to be no more than 15 minutes long. Even so, she includes a short amount of time for personal discussion, replacing water-cooler discussions, which she says are important to include along with business purposes of any meeting. People who are sociable by nature were hardest hit by the change to remote work, Bogle said. Helping Gateway deal with the situation was the "Chief Fun Officer," Hobie Higgins. He put out monthly videos with various updates, sometimes as often as weekly. "It was all about engagement," Bogle said. "It was all about shout-outs to people, fun type of things, just so people still felt part of the organization. at was wildly successful." e fun continued with Gateway's private Facebook group, which would include various contests, complete with gift card prizes. Vogel added, "It was just another way of trying to keep people engaged with each other and take a break from everything that was going on." Gateway also held several mental health webinars discussing issues like how to cope with working remotely. A virtual physician app made available to employees had a mental health component to it. LOOKING AHEAD Once most people are back in the office, Mobilia expects to have less-frequent virtual or in-office meetings. A hybrid meeting featuring remote and in-office workers doesn't work too well, she added. While Embrace will have a larger percentage of staff work remotely when COVID-19 wanes than it did before the pandemic started, most entry-level workers, IT staff that maintain the equipment, and some others whose work dictate they be on site will be in the office, Mobilia said. Work will remain remote for many, however. Even those returning to the office are likely to go in only a few days a week, according to Lynch. "Management gets to reduce its footprint somewhat. It's going to have major impact on in terms of how much they pay in rent." Rent can be a major expense for organizations with multiple offices, Lynch added. Reducing that expense helps the bottom line. Another way lenders and servicers can control expenses is through technology, which enables better scalability and provides more reliability than loan officers, for example, because the latter can go to a competitor and take their business with them. Camerieri said, "e pandemic has neutralized the importance of the physical presence of human beings who source business in the marketplace. I think the pandemic has opened up the eyes of a lot of originators as looking at different ways to generate business." Technology will also help lender/servicers maintain their profits as interest rates increase and margins tighten, Camerieri said. "Once you get into margin compression, it almost doesn't matter how much volume you have coming in, really, if you're not quick and nimble and have lower costs," Zeibert added. "e lenders who have the technology to deliver the right price points to the right people at the right time will win. ose who don't, will lose." "Mortgage bankers are traditionally slow to hire and slow to fire," Seehausen agreed. So those that have relied largely on people to handle the spike in volume in 2020 will be challenged if volume drops off as expected in the second half of 2021. One of the many technologies lenders were forced to embrace more during the pandemic was desktop appraisals, Camerieri added. While the technology alleviated the need for someone to physically visit the property, only time will tell if the savings will be worth the extra risk since there is no inspection of the inside of a home. e pandemic highlighted that mortgage customers are ready for a different type of experience. Buege added, "ey want that high-touch, high-service experience. ey want to get on the phone and to talk to a competent professional mortgage lender, but then they want [the mortgage] to be delivered to them in a digital experience. ere's no going back. e consumers have made their mark; they've shown the mortgage industry that they want a digital experience with that high-touch service. And that's where our focus is going to be for the coming year." Phil Britt started covering mortgages and other financial services matters for a suburban Chicago newspaper in the mid-1980s before joining Savings Institutions magazine in 1992. When the publication moved its offices to Washington, D.C., in 1993, he started his own editorial services room and continued to cover mortgages, other financial services subjects, and technology for a variety of websites and publications.

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