Pennymac Financial Services Inc. employs nearly 4,400 workers nationwide. But its headquarters in Westlake Village and sales offices in California, Nevada, Florida, Texas and Hawaii have all sat vacant since early March. That’s because Pennymac has shifted about 90 percent of its workforce to a remote model to tamper the spread of COVID-19. “Near the end of February, it became clear that we had to develop a work-from-home strategy,” Jeff Grogin, Pennymac’s chief enterprise operations officer, told the Business Journal. Pennymac isn’t alone. California, like many states, is prohibiting gatherings of more than 10 people in an enclosed area, pushing office employers of all kinds into a forced experiment in working at home. In the Valley, business service firms such as financial lenders, accountants, consultants and insurance brokerages are learning how to complete their normal tasks with technology from outside the office. New methods Grogin said because Pennymac uses a network of call centers to acquire and interact with customers, there isn’t much of a change between how its employees work in the office versus how they work at home. “I don’t think there’s that much difference, other than not having water cooler interactions and having video meetings rather than in-person meetings,” he said. Grogin added that Pennymac’s first step in preparing for the outbreak was to make sure its payroll functions were accessible in more than one geographic location, ensuring employees would keep getting paid on time if the usual payroll office had to close. “We needed to have redundancy,” he said. According to Alan Kazden, partner at accounting firm Rose Snyder Jacobs & Kazden in Encino, remote work is highlighting just how important a high-powered scanner really is for CPAs. “The biggest thing for tax people is printing big tax returns,” he said. “They’re much easier to look at on a hard copy than a screen.” Kazden is still working in the office, but about 50 of the company’s 53 employees have transitioned to work from home. An administrative staffer is still making routine stops by the office to scan important documents. Kazden said managers are seeing marginal inefficiencies as employees adjust to the new model – particularly new hires who are still in training. April usually means crunch time for tax accountants, but Kazden said the coronavirus’ economic toll has replaced much of that work with requests from clients regarding loans through the federal government’s paycheck protection program, which is advertising $550 million in low-interest Small Business Administration loans issued through local banks. “I feel like a doctor and all my patients are coming to the office on the same day,” Kazden said. Manufacturers face a different set of work-from-home challenges. In Valencia, LiefLabs, a maker of food supplements and vitamins, has had to adjust to improve off-site communication between departments. Because the company makes food products, state regulators deemed it essential and most of its employees are still working at its manufacturing plant. But about 15 administrative staffers, marketers and salespeople are working remotely. “Work from home wasn’t even a concept in our minds two weeks ago,” said Chief Executive Adel Villalobos. “It’s been a quick shift.” Villalobos said “out of sight, out of mind” was a problem at first, so the company started requiring at-home employees to check in with a manager at the beginning and end of each day, as well as to loosely document their daily tasks. From these records, Villalobos said, “we’ve gotten much more detailed work instructions. … We realized we didn’t communicate procedurally before, and we identified that we needed to document our production processes.” Because employees are no longer sitting next to one another, he said, the company realized there was lag time between when an order was placed, when the order entry department logged it in the company system and when the production team received that information and began making the batch.. That experience has inspired Villalobos to look into automating some of those administrative steps. “Not to replace staff, but (to eliminate) the mundane activity of retyping a purchase order to fit our template,” he said. “If things are automated, staff could be freed up to do much more intuitive things.” For now, LiefLabs has integrated instant messaging channel Slack and video conferencing software Zoom to keep at-home employees engaged. Villalobos said the company is encouraging such video-based team-building exercises as “crazy hat day.” Future of work Remote work was increasing in popularity long before coronavirus, and Kazden posited the outbreak will push office employees to demand even more work-from-home options from their employers. “When this is over, you’re going to have millions of people saying, ‘Why do I have to go back to the office?’” he said. Despite identifying some inefficiencies with remote work, Kazden said his accounting firm will likely play ball if employees request more freedom to work remotely. He said lots of his employees live in the tri-cities area – quite a drive from Encino – so they already have the option to work from home one or two days a week. “We realize that to keep people, we have to be more flexible with that,” he said. Kazden said these shifts are leading the firm to consider downsizing on real estate. “Should we lease half the office space (on our renewal)? We’re more focused on getting over the virus for now,” he added. LiefLabs’ Villalobos said his administrative employees will go back to on-premise work once the virus passes, but added he is considering an option for staffers to work from home a few days a month. “People can use those days to work lightly and organize,” he said. Still, Villalobos said some things just aren’t the same from home. “What goes away is the social part,” he said. “We can’t ignore that work is a social environment, just like schools, and that human beings are social animals. … It’s important to make sure (remote employees) realize they’re still part of a team.” Tim Gaspar, chief executive of Gaspar Insurance Services in Woodland Hills, said his experience has been that employees tend to be happier and more productive working in an environment alongside their coworkers. “When you have someone isolated, there are negative mental consequences,” he said. Gaspar took on his first remote worker four years ago when a valuable employee moved out of the region for economic reasons. Today, about 15 percent of Gaspar’s staff works remotely. While that rate has bounced to 90 percent during the outbreak, Gaspar said it would deflate back to 15 percent once the crisis subsides. “Because I’ve had people working from home for a number of years, I know the downsides,” he said. “Because they don’t get the water cooler talk, they fall behind in regards to the latest and greatest in our business – which vendors are doing what, and what the trends are with customers.” Gaspar said it takes a while for these issues to crop up. “Over a month, it’s not a big deal. Over a year or two, it’s a totally different story. … They’d just be out of the loop.” Pennymac’s Grogin said the company’s staffers will return to their call centers once the outbreak wanes. “Our culture is to work at the office,” he said. Grogin added heavy regulations in the financial industry will limit what remote work options Pennymac could offer. Emergency conditions have enabled the company to work from home full time during the pandemic, but he said it will be up to regulators to decide in what capacity remote work is appropriate once the crisis has passed.
Work@Home Experiment
