In community management, your team becomes not just your family, but family to your residents as well. These are the faces your residents see and interact with around their neighborhood each day, so building a natural rapport and foundation of trust is important. If your residents see high turnover, they won’t see members of your community fixing their residences and managing the community – they’ll see strangers over and over again. For this reason, employee retention is a valuable time investment for any community management team. A few employee retention tips that you can use to keep the family together in 2024 are:

  • Provide flexibility for your team – Flexibility is important to a healthy work/life balance, and it’s become a great priority for professionals in all fields in 2024. Flexibility might look different for different teams. For a maintenance team, this may look like maintenance workers switching off on “on-call” shifts taking care of maintenance issues during off-hours. For customer service staff, this might mean allowing work-from-home days. Discuss what flexibility means to your team and adjust accordingly to keep your employees balanced and happy.
  • Recognize and reward – Your residents aren’t the only ones who want to feel valued by your team. Your entire community management team, from your maintenance staff to your marketing crew, works hard to promote your brand. To keep them working hard and performing at their best, inspire them with recognition and rewards that prove how much you value their effort. This can be employee of the month awards, special parking spots, gift card or other small gift raffles, rewarding with days off, or anything that really shows your team how much they mean to you.
  • Encourage collaboration – Your teams work best when they work together, and you build a natural “work family” environment at the same time. Rather than creating a silo situation with your different teams, embrace a culture that brings everyone together instead. Your customer service team should know your maintenance staff well in order to address resident maintenance issues. Your management team should feel friendly and comfortable to all of your teams as a whole to encourage open communication. Team building events, happy hours, and staff parties can help to build a natural collaborative environment.

Keep your employees as part of the family and give your community an organic neighborhood feel. At OccupancySolutions.com we can help you to build a happier team. For more on employee retention tips for 2024, contact us today.