Rocket Companies, the now publicly traded parent company of Detroit's Quicken Loans, originated $72.3 billion in residential mortgages during the second quarter a 40 percent increase from the first three months of this turbulent year.
They also added 100,000 clients to their portfolio of 1.93 million mortgages they service each month.
And the company's 19,000 employees largely handled this growth from their home offices, basements, kitchen tables or wherever they've been encamped since mid-March to avoid contracting the coronavirus.
"Working from home has been demonstrated it works and it can be very, very efficient," Rocket Companies CEO Jay Farner said Thursday on CNBC just before the company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. (See story, below.)
For a company that just reaped at least $1.8 billion in stock sales and is known for wringing out every bit of productivity from its white-collar workforce, working from home has been a success.
It's also probably here to stay.
A recent Crain's survey of metro Detroit C-suite executives found 53 percent of companies either haven't asked employees to return to the workplace or are making it voluntary.
"It's panned out well," said Vince Mattina Jr., president and founding partner of the accounting firm Mattina, Kent & Gibbons, P.C., which has offices in Rochester and Lapeer. "I would anticipate this is going to be a more permanent situation with the ability to do less time in the office virus or not."
The big tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Facebook have announced plans to extend work-from-home into mid-2021. Twitter has told its employees they can work outside of the office "forever."
When the coronavirus pandemic hit Michigan five months ago, most assumed that working from home would be a temporary phase until the public health threat subsided.
The virus would pass, we wrongly assumed.
We'll get back to the office by summer. Wrong again.
In late March, I went into the Crain Communications office and packed up a monitor, keyboard, mouse and computer docking station for my home office, assuming I'd be working there until Memorial Day or Fourth of July at the latest.
Now I think it's safe to assume we'll be mostly working from home or wherever there's strong WiFi and strong coffee until next Memorial Day.
The virus isn't going away, in part because as a society we still haven't come to grips with the necessary social distancing and human isolation needed to wrestle it under control.
With all of the rancor over mask-wearing in public, business travel looks highly unappealing and downright scary for some workers.
In the Crain's C-suite survey, nearly 73 percent of executives surveyed said they were not comfortable attending a business conference.
The survey found 46 percent of executives said they're not asking employees to travel and just 12 percent said they would reinstitute travel in 2021. Fewer than one in every 15 of the executives surveyed said they've taken a business trip outside of Michigan since mid-March, while less than 10 percent said they planned to reinstate company travel this calendar year.
The nearly nonexistent business travel also may be a result of cost-cutting measures to survive. About 82 percent of CEOs surveyed said their businesses had sustained a revenue loss of 10 percent of higher, while 58 percent said they've laid off workers. Another 23 percent said they've imposed across-the-board pay cuts to weather the pandemic recession.
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Analysis: Work from home is here to stay, but it sure isn't sitting still - Crain's Detroit Business