How to maintain a culture of collaboration through a crisis

By Susan LaMonica | Citizens Chief Human Resources Officer

While the coronavirus pandemic has cut a broad, disruptive swath across markets, industries, and sectors, it also presented an opportunity for businesses to gain traction on desired cultural shifts. The companies that made efforts to foster more collaborative cultures before COVID-19 found themselves forced to stress-test, and even accelerate, those efforts in order to keep operating.

While necessity is certainly the mother of invention — and change — true cultural shifts will stagnate without a strong sense of purpose among employees. Sustaining and growing employees' connection to that purpose is critical for companies to foster engagement, sustain morale, and allow a collaborative culture to firmly take root. This becomes particularly important as businesses struggle to serve customers during an unprecedented crisis such as COVID-19.

Truly understanding the value a company provides to those it serves and creating clear connections for employees about the impact of their roles to that purpose helps employees fortify their connection to a company-wide ethos that encourages and enables broad-scale cooperation. While this notion might seem simple, it cannot be overstated how working together toward a common purpose helps people share ideas, form connections, solve problems, and build or achieve something collectively.

At Citizens, we were well along on a journey to transform our culture to be more collaborative, and the COVID-19 pandemic allowed us to test the strength of the culture and build on that already solid base. We demonstrated that we could reallocate resources to where they were most needed and implement policy quickly to meet the demands of those circumstances.

It starts at the top

Leadership, which provides the initial propulsive force behind collaboration, can further strengthen the effort during a crisis through sustained and transparent communication. Frequent and regular engagement with employees by all levels of leaders is important. Demonstrating flexibility during uncertain times is also crucial for creating followership among employees and effectively steering the company and making prudent and nimble adjustments as needed.

To that end, companies must provide managers with the latitude and discretion to work with their teams and understand their unique circumstances. This acknowledgement and accommodation of employees' health and needs will instill trust, enable them to work more collaboratively, and move the business' objectives forward.

By taking the time to understand employees' needs while also having this flexible approach to working around those unique needs, companies will be better positioned if and when the need to marshal its resources for in-demand products or services arises.

Collaboration in action

The government aid package to small businesses — the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) — presented the challenge of issuing a huge amount of funds to small businesses in a very short time. To put into context, the SBA issued more loans in two weeks than it had in the previous 10 years.

At Citizens, this imperative presented an opportunity to demonstrate collaboration at scale. Our technology and staff had to process many thousands of client applications onto platforms in a compressed timeframe.

This was a very heavy lift, and the sense of purpose felt by those involved provided the essential fuel to get the job done.

At Citizens, we've instilled in employees a sense of our critical role as a regional bank in helping preserve our country's economic viability. Our leadership has made it clear that our many small business customers would depend on PPP funding for their very survival. In response, 1,500 employees from across the company were mobilized to scale up a practice area that typically has about 30. This team worked night and day to process customer applications before the PPP funds were depleted — strong collaboration tied inextricably to purpose.

Another example of putting strong collaboration to work on behalf of our customers was in staffing our call centers. When the initial impacts of the pandemic put a strain on staffing during a time of high demand, we were able to effectively flex talent across a range of disciplines to quickly meet the need. As with our work to support PPP, a strong sense of purpose paved the way for effective collaboration — quickly and on a large scale.

Collaboration and purpose in a crisis

Crises can expose debilitating shortcomings and dire needs across economies, communities, companies, and households. Such widespread disruption tests a business' culture and values. In this setting, organizations must ensure their employees feel they're doing purposeful work to keep them focused and aligned, and therefore better prepared to work together to address customers' needs.

Strengthening a company's culture of collaboration pays dividends. Businesses that were able to effectively marshal employees across departments to help perform large-scale emergency initiatives or projects during a crisis will reap intangible benefits in collaboration, productivity, employee loyalty, and customer trust in the future.