He's had a rethink on at-home work v office work and which is best for a mortgage business
The CEO of brokerage L&C Mortgages, Mark Harrington, (pictured) has told how the company has been rebuilt after a large number of advisers left in the wake of COVID, many setting up on their own in business.
L&C now offers its experienced brokers more flexible working, with options to work remotely from home – a concept that Harrington admits he has wrestled with. He is now ‘at peace’ with the model, and productivity is higher than it was at the start of the pandemic. The firm wrote over £15bn in mortgage business and handled over 75,000 applications last year, but it’s been a challenging period.
“We've had some bad times over the past three or four years,” Harrington told Mortgage Introducer. “COVID really hurt us. We've got a wholly employed workforce. Lots of people saw that they could go off and have much more flexibility whilst doing their job. So, we lost lots of advisers – between 75 and a 100 - who had been here a long period of time, and most of them went off and set up their own business and were self-employed, and the best of luck to them along the way.”
He continued: “I'll be brutally honest, two years ago, maybe longer, I would have wanted everyone to go back into the office - I would have been that person. Over the past two years, I was always thinking about what was the right thing to do. I think at the moment with where the business is, giving people the flexibility to work where they want to is probably the best thing for L&C. They could go down the road for an extra fiver if they wanted to, for someone that would let them work from home. We've got varying degrees of flexibility, We've got people who never go into the office, we've got people who live nowhere near an office. We've got people who go in one to two days a week.”
Harrington acknowledges that by allowing his staff to work remotely, it helps them save money on travel expenses. “That's really helped keep people,” he said. Does the CEO think his staff work as efficiently from home? “All we can do is rely on productivity, which is the KPI, and their mental health.” Harrington said. “We're more productive than when we started COVID, so that's superb. The upside to this, is that we can recruit experienced advisers from across the country, which is good. But I do worry that they never see any humans, and we do lots of things around mental health. I’d like people to be in the office a little bit more, but I wouldn't want everyone to be in the office all the time. I'd love to see every person go into the office once a week. I think that would be brilliant to help them in terms of learning and development, and engagement.”
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Rebuilding a mortgage business through recruitment
L&C has 350 mortgage and 90 protection advisers, and two offices, in Bath and Newcastle. It focused on recruiting fresh brokers between 2021 and 2024, to build the company back up to where it was pre-pandemic. “It took two or three years because the majority of our recruitment is inexperienced people who we train to be mortgage advisors in our academy,” Harrington explained. “It was a big strain on the people doing the interviews and then the people who do the inductions. A new adviser, who's inexperienced, does a Zoom course for six weeks. They then come into the office three or four days a week, supervised. When they become competent, within nine to twelve months, they're given the option of working from home.” Positively, of those brokers who left L&C over the past eighteen months or so, around half have returned because they didn’t feel they were giving the same level of advice elsewhere, Harrington noted.
Having been in the mortgage business for almost 22 years, he has undoubtedly seen a lot of change in that time, but possibly at no time more so than in the past few years. Yet, his change of opinion on working remotely, on staff not having to dress too formally to do business, plus a recent acceptance of the necessity to embrace AI, says much about his open minded approach to leadership, since taking on the role of chief executive officer a year ago. “We've got to embrace the AI movement,” Harrington said. “I changed my mind on this about two weeks ago. I was thinking, ‘fight it, fight it’, but we have just got to make sure that L&C is at the forefront of it and we are not being left behind. I'm a firm believer that humans will always be needed in a mortgage transaction - more than anything, to provide the reassurance that customers need that they’re doing the right thing, and to give that element of advice.” Will it mean a loss of staff eventually?
“It depends how we grow,” said Harrington. “We've got shareholders who want to grow and grow and grow. If we can get lead generation better through AI, more leads coming through the door, we will need more people, but they'll be more productive along the way. I'm going to embrace it and see where I end up.”
