Preparing Your Team: 8 Strategies to Reduce Stress During a Core Conversion

No doubt about it – core conversions are notoriously demanding for everyone involved. To reduce the stress and fatigue your employees may feel during a core conversion, it is important to maintain transparent, consistent communication and provide the tools needed for a successful transition.

How can you do that? Here are eight key strategies for leading staff through a challenging core conversion:

1. Communicate the "Why": Clearly explain the purpose behind the conversion to help staff understand how it aligns with organizational goals, which reduces uncertainty.
2. Manage Pace & Schedule "Breathers": Avoid overwhelming the team by breaking the conversion into manageable phases and scheduling them out, ensuring there is time to recover between intense periods.
3. Provide Adequate Training: Invest in training to build capability and confidence, ensuring employees have the skills to adapt to new systems. Utilize the various training resources provided by the core vendor. Develop “real life” scenarios where staff can practice using core software in the test environment. The better staff are trained and have access to “hands on” practice, the more comfortable they will become with the changes.
4. Leverage Change Champions: Appoint “champions” within teams to model positive attitudes, share feedback and answer questions.
5. Celebrate Small Wins: Recognize and celebrate milestones to maintain morale and momentum. Small tokens of appreciation, such as a dress-down days, sweet treats or flexible hours, can go a long way in boosting the team’s spirits leading up to and throughout the conversion.
6. Foster a Safe Environment: Create an environment where employees can safely share concerns or mistakes without fear of punishment. Be open to their ideas and recommendations for possible procedure changes they feel may be improved upon with the new system.
7. Use Data to Track Emotions: Utilize surveys and one-on-ones to gauge employee stress levels and adjust strategies accordingly. You can also create a “Worry Board” for your staff to express their concerns with the conversion. You may get some good insights, particularly if it’s done anonymously.
8. Communication is Key: You can’t communicate too much with your staff. There really is no such thing. And when you do communicate, be intentional about it:

• Consider using words like “upgrade” and “system enhancement” versus “conversion.”
• Fire people up! Be excited! Be future-focused!
• Thank staff for asking questions and bringing issues to your attention.
• Thank staff for being candid.

Take the stress out of core conversions, even if it’s in small, simple ways – your staff will thank you for it!

As the VP, core & digital solutions, Charnell oversees the CUaxis department. She is responsible for developing and managing the overall internal core strategy, as well as our digital banking platform, Zephyr, for the Corporate and our external core strategy with our partnership with CU*Answers. Charnell works closely with executive management and key staff, both internal and external, to ensure a strong strategic partnership that allows us to offer a robust core solution, CBX, previously known as CU*BASE, to our member credit unions.