When Carla Altepeter took the position of chief executive officer of Numerica Credit Union, she saw some significant problems. At Numerica—which serves borrowers and savers in a region that includes Spokane, Washington, and northern Idaho—employees below the top-management level did not understand the organization’s goals or have a voice in decision making. This lack of communication isolated individuals, and they did not function as a team. Projects then fell behind as the individual charged with project management struggled to keep track of all the work. In addition, employees directed their energy toward fixing problems rather than pleasing customers. These problems ultimately showed up in Numerica’s business performance: Its growth lagged behind that of its competitors.

Altepeter decided that Numerica’s employees needed to be better connected with the information that would help them collaborate on achieving shared goals. She brought in a software company to set up a system called Connections Online (COL). With COL, every employee can look up the credit union’s strategy and see all of the goals that are aimed at carrying out that strategy. They can see what projects are under way, who is working on them, and what the status is. Besides making project management more efficient, the COL system shows employees how each of them functions as part of something bigger.

The COL system has been especially helpful for projects that span the credit union’s different departments. In a single year, Numerica could be carrying out more than a dozen projects that bring together employees from different departments and levels of the organization. For example, the credit union’s facilities team recently coordinated a project to remodel one of Numerica’s branches. Altepeter notes that collaboration across departments can take extra time but results in higher-quality outcomes. In the case of the branch remodeling, use of the COL system helped the team finish on time and under budget because from the beginning, everyone involved understood the project’s scope and goals.

Reward programs also help Numerica meet its goals for improving how employees collaborate. Along with their pay and benefits, employees can earn rewards for behavior that supports the credit union’s values and performance. A recognition program called STAR (which stands for Service, Teamwork, Accountability, and Reflect, learn, and grow) acknowledges employees who do what the company refers to as “good deeds.”

All this attention to how employees work together has paid off for Numerica. In the two years after Altepeter became CEO, the credit union saw its loans to customers jump by 21 percent the first year and by another 19 percent the following year. Return on assets (a basic measure of financial performance for a credit union) also was exceeding goals. Out of the 16 performance measures Altepeter has been tracking, she recently noted that nine are significantly exceeding their goals, and only one is falling short.1