LOUISVILLE, Ky. — During the summer, Stored Value Solutions (SVS), a gift card company headquartered in Louisville, started bringing back executive-level management to the office. Then, the rest of its employees followed suit starting on Nov. 1 this year.

However, employees working back in the office doesn’t mean SVS looks like it once did pre-pandemic.

In fact, President Mark Schatz told Spectrum News the company will never return back to 100% of its employees around Louisville working in the headquarters, like they once did pre-pandemic. 

Daniel Noltemeyer, an office clerk at SVS, said his favorite part of working at the company is his co-workers.

“Their sense of humor. Their laughter. Their smiles, and the way that they make me feel at work. It’s just like a family,” said Noltemeyer, listing what exactly he loves about working with them. 

When the pandemic hit and the his job came to a screeching halt, he was devastated by the upended routine.

“That was a nerve-racking feeling for me…crying, I was just holding on tight to my counter top in my kitchen," Noltemeyer said. “And I didn’t wanna let go of my kitchen counter.”

After more than 19-months away, Noltemeyer loves being back in the office. 

“The first day was a really good, huge success to come back, but sometimes when you first come back to work it is nerve-racking, but it’s not that much anymore. It makes me happy,” he said. 

Vice President of Client Development Jamie Badgett worked remotely for a decade before starting at SVS in May this year.

“Working from home, you do get lonely,” Badgett said. “You can have conference calls. You can have the video calls, but you don’t have that, ‘Hey, I need to take a mental break, and, you know, walk to the vending machine or go grab a cup of coffee and say, ‘hello,’ to various people.”

However, Badgett also recognizes the positives of working remotely, such as more flexibility with the work day and no commute. 

“So working from home, probably the number one issue with my commute was stepping over my sleeping golden retriever. Now, it’s whether I’m going to go home on the Watterson Expressway or cut through the neighborhood behind me,” Badgett jokingly said.

He was serious, though, about the fact that there is time lost when driving to work. However, lost productivity from commuting, he said, is gained back by in-person collaboration in the office.

“Just that peripheral knowledge that you get, you know, by talking to someone, and the conversation just naturally flowing into, ‘Hey, by the way, did you know this,’ or maybe someone might be in the office and, ‘Well, hey, go talk to that individual. They might have a different perspective on it.’ So I think just the expediency with sharing information is the number one benefit that I see,” Badgett said

Schatz said when SVS strategized on employees returning to work, there was no objective regarding how many employees should work in the office, a hybrid model, or at home. 

Executive-level management, like Badgett and Schatz, started working in-person over the summer. Then other SVS employees, like Noltemeyer, returned to work in November after two pushed back start dates due to spread of the Delta variant.

Schatz added that there was also no objective on how many people should work in the office versus remotely. How much time an employee works at SVS’s headquarters depends on what makes sense for them and their team, such as finance and accounting teams working more remotely; while client-facing roles work more in the office.

“Instead, we have them come in on a specific schedule, you know, like once a week or twice a week, or we purposefully have them come in at a particular time for a particular purpose,” Schatz explained. “And we are very thoughtful about what we want to accomplish so that when we do have those engagement opportunities, it’s not just something we are checking a box saying, ‘Here, we’ve done this for X amount of hours or X days a month.”

Schatz said SVS’s headquarters will never look like its pre-pandemic days, where 100% of its employees, working at its headquarters, working in-person.

“Not only can we operate as well, we can actually operate better. It’s a better experience for some of the employees. They are more productive because they aren’t doing the commute back-and-forth,” Schatz said. “It’s amazing the kind of meetings you can put together on Zoom.”

Schatz said SVS is very aware of the current job market, regarding the U.S. labor shortage and the “Great Resignation.” He said allowing teams and employees to choose how they work is very much in the interest of the company, when it comes to productivity and employee retention.