Having a strong team is crucial to being effective and efficient in the property management industry, while also maintaining great relationships with clients but with so many different people covering so many different tasks, it can become difficult to remain across all things as a principal, including the management of your team.
Given the staff are the face of your business and its capabilities, it is essential that they are leaving both your landlords and tenants with a positive impression. Below are some ways in which you can ensure your team of property managers are keeping on top of things and helping to grow your business.
Communicate
It’s no secret that working as a team is more effective than doing it alone; many hands make light work, and in an industry where any number of unexpected urgent tasks can arise, it’s helpful knowing someone is there to help. However, if there’s no communication among the team, you may end up with three different people doubling up on tasks or, worse still, doing nothing at all with the thought that someone else is looking after it.
Communication is a key aspect of having a strong property management team, whether it’s ensuring everyone is up to date on repairs or trying to find new tenants. Keeping in contact and regularly updating your team with priorities or understanding what their priorities are, can help keep the team running efficiently while ensuring you always know who is where and doing what. Whether this is done through regular team meetings or one-on-one daily chats, it’s essential as a principal to have an understanding of the day-to-day demands of your property managers.
This can also be done with your software. With the transparency that PropertyMe offers, communicating across the board becomes even more simple. Not only will tenants, landlords and suppliers be kept in the loop but your team will also know about what repairs have been booked, or when you have organised an inspection, allowing you to avoid any organisational issues.
With our new messages feature coming in early 2017, this will again be made even easier, allowing all team members to have transparent access to incoming and outgoing messages across the entire company portfolio. Communicating with your team on, not only a professional level but on a personal level will help you all build strong relationships and allow everyone to develop as a team, as well as individuals.
Set Clear Expectations
Setting clear expectations ties in well with the importance of communication. If you aren’t being clear about what you expect, your team members will have more trouble completing jobs and meeting your expectations, affecting how they work as a team.
Being clear about timelines and goals for the team means they will have fewer questions and fewer doubts about what is expected of them. Rather than sitting around scratching their head and worrying about asking too many questions, they’ll have a clearer idea what you want them to achieve as they get to work.
Motivate
Motivation is always an important part of creating an efficient and strong team but trying to keep morale and motivation high is a task easier said than done. Working as part of a team allows your employees to feel less overwhelmed by the amount of work they have, or at least reduces the feeling that they are in it alone.
Sometimes knowing that the support and advice of more senior team members are never far away can help lessen feelings of anxiety. Recognising milestones and losses is very important too. Rewarding employees for hard work and big wins can boost morale beyond expectations, whether it’s a cash bonus or small token to congratulate a job well done.
In an industry where competition between staff can be high (which is never a bad thing), celebrating team victories can also ensure that camaraderie amongst the team stays high. At the end of the day, achieving success across the entire team is what helps the business.
Observe and React
A final aspect of maintaining a strong team is knowing when things are great, and when they are not. There are always small ways to improve, and, as a leader, it is the job of the principal to find out where things are going wrong.
- Is morale low?
- Is a team member underperforming?
- Is someone perhaps unskilled in a particular area?
Talk with your team to see what’s wrong, before working with them to develop a plan to fix the situation. However, the most important thing is to ensure you remain relatable as a human being.
Linking back to the importance of communication, knowing your employees makes it easier to realise when they aren’t themselves. Being a strong team includes getting to know everyone on a personal level and using this knowledge to observe when someone might be going through something.
If they are stressed about work, whether it be a certain client, another team member’s actions, or a software package that drives them up the walls, the capabilities and attitude of a team are a reflection of the management that leads them.