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The Importance Of "Work-Life" Balance In Today's Remote Work With Emily Farley
It's good to have you here for another episode. It's Monday, June 7th, 2021. We give the date for those that are reading on a downloaded basis. You can stay up to date on all that's going on. We got some people dialing in, the old-fashioned style of using the phone. I'm so excited. I don’t know about your area, but we are getting some serious amount of rain here in Texas. I'm thinking of our friends in California and how badly they need it. We have the Governor of Utah saying, “I don't care what your faith is. Start praying for rain.” You know it's bad in certain parts where certain governors are praying that it starts raining, and we are very soon here in Texas praying it stops raining. I haven't got any much flooding, but we will receive all the rain we can get. We love it as long as it doesn't flood. I don’t know if you guys knew this, but a couple of episodes ago, we had a thunderstorm roll in overhead. I got knocked out. We lost internet, we lost computer, we lost power, and we lost everything right in the middle of the show in the middle of the Hot Topic segment as we were kicking it off. I don't think you guys recognized it, but it's one of those things. Doing these episodes is so much fun, but we are so glad to have you as our reader here and we get to share another exciting episode. This show was created by mortgage professionals. It is for mortgage professionals. We are delighted to have you here as our reader. Our commitment is to bring you timely information in a blog format that you can read anytime and anywhere. This Hot Topic is near and dear to my heart. We are going to be talking with Emily Farley, Chief Lending Officer of Atlantic Bay Mortgage. We are going to be talking about the importance of work-life balance in this remote work environment. A lot of people are struggling, “I wear the lines. I used to leave and go to work and then I come home. I'm with my family and there are good boundaries on that. Now it's all blurred and how are we doing it?” Atlantic Bay has been named the best large mortgage company to work for in the nation. We are thrilled to have Emily Farley come on and talk about how they are working through the work-life balance. We will be doing that in the Hot Topic segment. I want to say a special thank you to our friends over at Industry Syndicate. We are proud to be affiliated with IndustrySyndicate.com. It's a great place for you to pick up and listen to other podcasts that are out there. It's a lot of great podcasts. We are thrilled that we have inspired so many to come on and start doing this. It was Dave Savage and I were the first ones out there. It was Dave Savage of Mortgage Coach, my dear friend. It's great to be out there early with something that has taken off. I want to let you know that if there's anyone out there with an underwriter who's looking for employment or if you are having to lay one off, I have a client, Michael DiClemente in Watson Mortgage in Florida, in the Jacksonville area who is looking for underwriters. If you know of anybody, please get ahold of me and/or get ahold of Michael DiClemente, President of Watson Mortgage. I want to give a shout-out to Black Knight. They are putting on and hosting the Hedging 101 Benefits of Delivering Loans on a Mandatory Basis. It's a webinar. A lot of people, especially loan officers, do not understand the concept of hedging and how that works. They do or some think they do. It doesn't matter. Have everyone dial in and read this. It’s the benefits of it. Hedging 101 caught my attention. I know hedging. I have done it and all the companies I have owned have done it, but it's good to get a refresher course. Check out Hedging 101 Benefits of Delivering Loans on a Mandatory Basis webinar that Black Knight is putting on. I want to say a special thank you to Mortgage Bankers Association of America, Michael Fratantoni for giving us the economic forecast. I got to get him back on and figure out what's going on with economics here. When you are at the Mortgage Bankers Association of America website, MBA.org, you should get signed up for the Mortgage Action Alliance. It is a very powerful way of having your voice heard on the hill. Most of the time, we are in step with the NRA, National Association of REALTORS. We need to make sure that we are in step with them, but we are different. We need to make sure we have our voices heard as well. Also, the Lenders One is a great co-op along with The Mortgage Collaborative. These two co-ops do a great job of allowing you to get up close and personal with your peers. Find out what others are doing to solve the problems of their day. Check out both these cooperatives. Also, the Community Mortgage Lenders of America, another association that does a great job helping independent mortgage lenders. Indecomm has some solutions for every stage of the mortgage life cycle including automation, outsourcing, and compliance. I'm fixated on the bots that they create. They have some great technology. Check it out. Also, Insellerate. We got Josh Friend teed up to be a guest coming up here. Josh has got a great company that helps with the leading-edge technology and mortgage expertise for pre-design campaigns, marketing campaigns, and sales campaigns that help empower engagement. Check out Insellerate.com. The Knowledge Coop does a great job of helping deliver training through its Learning Management System, their LMS system. They do a great job so check out Knowledge Coop, as well as Mobility MMI and Modex. I'm so grateful for both of these companies. Ben Teerlink in Mobility MMI, Mortgage Market Intelligence as well as Dale Larson over at Modex, both of these companies do a great job of helping you find the right loan officers, selecting them, targeting them, and going after them. I keep talking to my clients. “How are you sourcing your people? Are you impressed with the upper number or are you impressed with the bottom-line number?” Find out who's doing business in your market as being successful. Use these two tools for great ability to market and find the right loan officers and also find the right realtors. I will let you check these both out. They will give you demonstrations by mentioning Lykken on Lending, so be sure to do that. I appreciate them. I want to say a special thank you to Rob, Les, Allen, Alice, and Matt for their contributions every week. Welcome, everybody. We are now entering into the Hot Topic segment of the show and we are going to be talking with Emily Farley, Chief Lending Officer of Atlantic Bay Mortgage. We are going to be talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and something that Alice and I have talked about numerous times in our travels and talking about how to balance this work-life thing. I'm sensitive to it because I was not sensitive to it when I was first married and I burned out a marriage because I didn't have the right work-life balance. Fortunately, Nancy and I have been married for many years so I had a great mulligan there, but why do we have to go through that pain? We are going to learn about that now, so please welcome Emily Farley. Emily, it’s good to have you here. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I have listened to you for years and feel like I know you and the rest of the team. I'm honored to be here. We are honored to have you here. Congratulations to Atlantic Bay Mortgage for being the number one best large mortgage company to work at in the United States. That's a pretty big honor. It's one of those that we are proud of. It's one of those that comes because of your team members. We don't have any control. There are a lot of these things you just put out there and you never know if people enter these contests, but our people speak and we are excited about it. We are thrilled to have you on. I have known Atlantic Bay. I have done a great job building a great company and great competitors to many of our clients out there, and we are thrilled to have you here talking about one of the most important parts. If you have a great company to work at, you guys have some success or some game in managing work-life balance. Why is work-life balance such an important topic for the mortgage industry and for companies that are focusing on 2021 and how to be successful? Talk about that. What are you doing? It's funny because we talk about maybe we can achieve balance but if we can achieve integration like if you can integrate your work-life and your personal life. As you said with COVID, it got very blurred for a lot of people, especially in our industry as busy as it was ever last 2020. Even now with heading back to the office, you have to be aware of this topic. We talk about it a lot. We work with highly driven people. Some have it figured out and some are still working on it. As leadership, I feel like it’s up to us to make sure we are always talking about it. We are helping our teams understand that it's okay to have boundaries and it's okay to step away. Our loan officers never want to lose a deal or have a realtor think they are not responding. [bctt tweet="It's okay to have boundaries. It's okay to step away. If you don't have the boundary, it's going to take a toll." username=""] If you don't have this boundary, it's going to take such a toll. You don't call your attorney or your accountant at 9:00 at night and expect them to call you back or you are going to fire them the next day. Our industry has put so much pressure on everyone for that instant response. As leaders, we have to help our teammates figure out how to communicate and have systems in place to make sure that we can try and have some of that integration. I almost like that better than balance because when you look at COVID, our lives are truly integrated. It blurred. How can a work-life balance contribute to the success of a mortgage company? With you receiving the award that Atlantic Bay did, you guys seem to have some insights and figure this a little bit out. It's hard. Everyone knows all that now you are trying to hire good loan officers or you are going to hire great operations members. If you do, you need to keep them. You have to make sure that we can be productive as a company, but if they are happy and they feel like they have a company that understands that and they do have a life outside of this and it's not just work, that's what we try and preach. That comes from the top. In 2020, technology helped, especially on the origination side. We have worked with our loan officers to make sure they have tools to have their clients digitally schedule time with them so they can block out their calendar and have time for different types of appointments, time for family time, time to work on stuff, and coaching around that time management. Sometimes in our industry, people think it is not possible that you are putting out fires every day. You can't have that. We have to work on that with our people. It's cliché, but we call it a culture of support. We want people to go on vacation so they can turn themselves off, not be tied to their phones, to our managers, and work to make sure that they say, “Transfer your phone to me. Tell your agents that I will take care of you. You can go and have some time away.” It's one of our loan officers who was on maternity leave. She had a beautiful baby and had still one of their best months ever because the team jumped in. They were taking calls and making sure that she was taken care of so she could spend that time with her newborn. We have somebody going through cancer and the treatments are invasive. The team has to rally around that. I was having dinner with a loan officer and they are getting ready to get married. Their fiancée was like, “He cannot take his phone and laptop on our honeymoon.” We are like, “Exactly. You cannot do that.” You have a team of management there to support. That's what's important to retain and that your employees feel that no matter what they do with the company. I love that, you can't take your phone. That's good basic marriage advice. Get him off with the right foot. That's so true. Alice, you and I talk about this all the time. It's been one of our favorite topics that you and I talk about, which is work-life balance. You have done a great job, and I know Union Home pushes this as well. What questions do you have for our guest? I love what you were describing, Emily. It is a lot about setting an example as well. They see senior leadership at their desk all the time, always doing emails, and sending emails on weekends, but a lot of it is there. I know one of the things that I wanted to ask you about was, by continuing to allow remote work in 2021, how is that affecting work-life. Especially, when I think of the parents who have kids at home. Everybody had to adjust, and now we are looking at coming back to work. I'd love your thoughts on the remote work option. The neat part about our company is that our operations team has been remote for years. It had it down. It helped us as a company be able to get great talent across the country, not just in our footprint. They tried to do things like sending them food, playing games, and integrating them into our culture when they were remote, but it was hard. That's a lot of what we have talked about as a company over the last few months. Some people want to go back. Some people, like you said, with childcare issues maybe can't or don't want to that they have their groove, and it's fine. We have some great programs and we respect that to make sure that they still have that balance even if they decide not to come back. We are fine with that. We have something called AB Life. Each week, there are virtual workout classes, family activities, reading and learning for the kids, personal growth, mental health, or physical health, and different things to try and engage the rest of the household too. We have a great team member who used to be on the Food Network and an incredible baker. You could do a cake pop with your family. Mine was an absolute disaster that I tried with my niece and nephew. With things like that, we finished for good, which was encouraging people during the day to get out, take a walk for a minute, walk the dog, and take a breath. Encouraging those things whether they are at the office or not is important. You will see people walking around our building during the day, a little group of them. They take a break, go outside, and go for walks. That's so important either remotely or back in the office. As you said, from a management viewpoint, we have to live it. We mandated vacation and non-working weekends for our operation staff a number of times and said, “No. You cannot work. We are not going to allow it. You have to step away.” With our loan officers, we pay them to take a vacation every year. We give them $2,000 to $4,000 based on their production level and say, “You have to go somewhere, step away, and then transfer your phone to us and recharge if nothing else.” That's important. To what you were saying, Alice, the nights and the weekends are one of the things that I'm trying to work on with the email. Sometimes, we need that time to catch up, but I'm trying to delay my email to the next day during working hours. Even Outlook has a little function, and it reminds you of that just so they don't even get that buzz on their phone and feel like they have to respond. Just because I'm choosing that time and it may work in my schedule better, I don't want to force that on anybody else. That's important. It gives us insights into why you guys were listed as the number one best large mortgage company to work for in the nation. We got a text message from one of our readers. He says, “Thank you for having Emily on. I love these ideas. I'm forwarding this to all of the execs in my company. ‘Pay me to leave. I go on vacation and take away my phone.’ My wife will love this.” We love getting feedback from our readers. Let's give some more insights into the secret sauce for this accomplishment and how it fits into your success. We all know this. Success is your people. You can have great systems. You have to have good people, and that's the heart of the core values of the company. Our core values are very simple. They are key things. We genuinely care. Under that, we put people first. We prioritize relationships. We work as a team and we are confidently humble. That's internally and then how we deal with all of our industry professionals and everybody outside of our company. That's very important to this, especially with the balance and expecting that family time. Also, making sure we are inspiring their growth, which is what every company needs to do. Our third core value is you must have fun. We work in such a stressful business and there are so many deadlines. You have to have fun, but you can't just say it. You have to live it. The management team has to live it. They can't be the ones that are in the background saying, “Where were you for fifteen minutes? What were you doing when somebody had to step away?” We get a lot of feedback around that. One of the reasons our teammates voted for this is that we listened to that feedback.
Important Links
- Atlantic Bay Mortgage
- IndustrySyndicate.com
- Mortgage Coach
- Watson Mortgage
- Black Knight
- Mortgage Bankers Association
- National Association of REALTORS
- Lenders One
- The Mortgage Collaborative
- Community Mortgage Lenders of America
- Indecomm
- Insellerate.com
- The Knowledge Coop
- Mobility MMI
- Modex
- Union Home
- Snapdocs
- Finastra