Credit union technology force multipliers

If you are a small or mid-sized credit union, you are probably like me – obsessed with finding force multipliers that can help your Credit Union get to the next level.  Often as smaller organizations (less than 250 employees) we struggle to get scale, grow fast enough and leverage our dedicated employees to carve out new markets and niches.  Ongoing Operations is no different and has found a number of great resources that we feel help us compete, grow, and help credit unions cheaper, faster and better than the past.  Here are few!

• Content Marketing –  If you think blogging is for the millennials you are DEAD WRONG!   Ongoing Operations started blogging in 2012 as an intentional way to communicate with our customers and prospects and leverage their natural use of Google to solve their business problems.  We have written over 500 blogs and it has lead to a constant stream of new customers that come to us instead of us having to go to them.  Ultimately this has been a huge efficiency game, a force multiplier, and in my experience it is way easier on the consumer side compared to the business to business world.
• Process and Procedure-  At Ongoing Operations we believe it is highly important to document our business processes, track performance and constantly refine them.  By standardizing the way we do day to day things we have been able to focus effort when things are simply taking too long for customers and improve performance in huge ways.   As CEO, I hate getting that granular but have found it an essential way to engage our team and help them see how small changes can add up to big impacts
• Painted Picture – This tool is a great way to build corporate culture.   Take the time to define your credit union in 3 to 4 pages of details around what it is like to be an employee, member, board member, brand, service expectations etc.  Hand it to new employees and watch the lousy/bad cultural fit employees head for the door with no effort on your part…Since OGO rolled this out we have had great success in finding and retaining the right talent.  We have extremely low turnover and a great dedicated team that has a great attitude!
• Training – If you can train your employees on any and everything you know that helps you make decisions faster, provide service faster etc. it is a huge multiplier.  If you have 100 employees and you improve each of their efficiency by 1% you end up with an entire extra employee at no additional cost.  OGO focuses on doing high impact training in short bursts every few weeks.  15 minutes on a specific routine tip or trick shared among your employees is a great force multiplier.
• Efficiency Tools –  With all of your super smart and dedicated employees – they probably know or have great apps to help them get all of their work done.  Whether it is a custom filter in outlook that automatically sorts email or a scheduling app – these make a huge difference.
• Stop Doing Some Stuff – One of the most important things you can do is give your employees permission to stop some things.  Look around and make some decisions with your team about the things that you can’t be best at, members don’t care about, or don’t make a big difference and just stop doing them!  It is tough to deprioritize but this can be a huge efficiency gain…

Put them all together and watch your credit union technology team and use of credit union technology improve over night.  A consistent weekly best practices or tips and tricks information share can make a huge difference in every organization!