It’s all too easy to get bogged down by the day-to-day runnings of operating and maintaining a property management company. In order for you to succeed, you need to prioritize self-improvement, hone and update your property management skills.
In this context, self-improvement isn’t about a new year’s resolution to hit the gym, or a promise to read a given number of books in a year. It is an unwavering commitment to an honest improvement of yourself in the workplace.
As a property manager, you need to have a set of goals that will help you identify personal success. For a property management team, this could be looking at the grand scheme of things like targeting and achieving a certain work order completion rate, increasing the tenant satisfaction level, or simply earning a specific amount of money you set out to make.
Setting goals is a vital component of self-improvement that can enable you to reach success points, and for you to do that you have to be willing to listen, be creative, work hard, and adapt when needed. The same applies to reaching team or business goals. It is quite unfortunate that many companies fail in collectively setting goals, and strategizing ways on how to achieve them.
There’s a need for how to stay consistent on the self-improvement train. More so, it is important to do it for yourself and as a team. So, how can you jump-start collective self-improvement, for yourself and your team, in property management?
Do Not Despise Humble Beginnings, but Think Big
Building a great team takes time and effort, it also requires an eye for talent. The best teams are made up of intelligent, smart, talented, and creative individuals that are motivated and encouraged to listen attentively to each other, exchange ideas, share knowledge, and collaborate. As the leader of your team, it is your responsibility to lead by example and help facilitate such an atmosphere.
Team Collaboration and Meetings
Encouraging team collaboration and establishing regular meeting times is a good way to enable the expression of ideas, thoughts, opinions, and solutions to customer needs, challenges, and work-related problems. Constant deliberations and regular meetings create a consistent outlet for solution selling. Additionally, It can also help to ensure that team members glean from each other’s thoughts, build working relationships and bonds. Healthy working relationships are good for productivity. Ultimately, the paramount goal is for people to be open, honest, and respectful of each other. More often than not, people want to be heard, and they want a sense of belonging. They want to know that their opinions and contributions matter.
Streamline Processes
The most effective property management teams have the ability to avoid the clutter, cut through the noise, and communicate effectively with each other, property owners, and tenants. If your team is heavily reliant on back-and-forth communications via email, phone, SMS, and text, best believe they’re spending more valuable time working at communicating than working. This shouldn’t be the case because there is a better way to communicate.
There are tools that can help you cut out the communication middle-man by connecting your property management team to each other. They can easily access the information they require through the web, on their smartphones, and PCs with apps like the BE-Mobile app. With this, you can quickly complete inspection tasks, manage risks, access critical files, send broadcast messages, and create and update work orders.
Create Team Building Activities
Team building exercises are important for building bonds and boosting workplace productivity. They’re equally good for the self-development journey of your team. These building exercises don’t necessarily have to mean a trust-fall. In reality, what you’re hoping to achieve is to get rid of communication barriers between teammates, this is a well-known bottleneck for workplace performance, engagement, and productivity. Team building activities can come in any form like playing games or participating in an extracurricular activity aimed at bringing people together. You can decide to serve meals to the homeless, grab a few drinks together at the bar, have a dancing competition, and be goofy about it.
Establish Accountability
Accountability is an essential trait needed to build a mindset and character that values responsibility. If you expect your team to succeed, it is important for each one of them to know who is accountable for what and how to manage their expectations.
One of the best self-improvement habits for a property management team is to sit down and review your team goals. Ask your team members to identify their individual responsibilities and the obstacles that may be in their way. With this feedback, what you should do as a property manager is to address them and help them find solutions. This exercise helps everyone to set achievable benchmarks.
Beyond group conversations, It is equally important to identify and use a tool that helps to hold your team accountable for its performance. This tool should be able to track service delivery statistics, such as tenant satisfaction, task completion rates, and filter the data into easy-to-read reports.
Open Learning should be encouraged
There is no Self-improvement without learning. The idea of self-improvement devoid of learning is defeatist. Open and collaborative learning should be encouraged in the workplace. Equip them with the tools they need to regularly engage with industry best practices via educational content like webinars, eBooks, training courses, meet-ups, and conferences. This will go a long way in honing and developing their skillset and it will be a win-win for everyone.
Build A Solution Selling Workplace
Property management is a tough profession, it requires an insane amount of commitment, hard work, and a propensity for solution selling. So much can happen on the average day of a property manager. However, the important thing to do is to remain focused and undeterred in finding solutions to the problems and challenges that affect your tenants, owners, and business. Develop this approach and you will be able to react expediently to workplace emergencies, and ultimately deliver better tenant service.