A good listener helps work through problems, allows the person to feel validated about their concerns, and to feel recognized as human beings.
We seek out relationships with people who will listen to us carefully, thoughtfully, and without judgment.
They won’t teach you this in business school, but a huge part of being a successful manager is learning how to listen in a way so that your employees feel heard. I’m not saying you need to be a therapist or that you need to connect emotionally with your staff.
I’m saying that you’ll keep your staff longer and they’ll be happier and more productive when they know you care about what they have to say and what they think.
In real estate, the motto is Always Be Closing (ABC). I like to modify that when it comes to employee retention – Always Be Listening.
Every employee interaction, when you’re paying attention, has clues about how people feel about their jobs and their lives.
Naturally, you care about your staff and want to know about their lives, but the day-to-day grind can keep you focused only on your own challenges. You might not have the bandwidth to entertain conversations outside of strictly work-related topics.
This is understandable, we’ve all been there many times.
Still, when you consider the value of a strong employee and the many costs involved in replacing that employee, it’s pretty plain that you need to prioritize their sense of job-related satisfaction.
After all, you know that you need to listen to your customers, or you’ll lose their business. It’s the same with employees – when you take their issues and concerns into consideration, you prove to them that they are valuable and respected.
At HireSmart Virtual Employees we understand that workers aren’t only motivated by their salaries, which means we understand how to help you keep your costs down and your morale up.
We have trained and competent virtual employees available who are worth being listened to.
If you’re looking to make some staffing changes to build a great team, we will help you find and keep employees for the long term. Book a free consultation here so we can listen to you and find solutions together.
The community association management industry is facing a serious drought: qualified community management professionals simply cannot be found. They are overworked and underpaid and yet still somehow cost management companies a small fortune whenever a new hire does come on board. But there is a solution. This series will cover the roles a virtual assistant can easily and affordably take on to help your staff take back their workday! This article will talk about why an HOA Maintenance Coordinator could be the best choice for your management company.
In our last article, we talked about how hard community association management companies are struggling to acquire and retain staff thanks in part to The Great Resignation. An already depleted pool of qualified management professionals is slowly getting smaller and smaller, hiking up staffing costs and forcing managers to overload themselves and burn out.
We then talked about all of the reasons why a HireSmart Virtual Employee (VE) or virtual assistant (VA), like a virtual HOA Accounting Assistant, solves a lot of the problems most management companies face today. But what if you’re already happy with your accounting staff? What other options are available to you?
When you think about a traditional “assistant” you might imagine someone running around fetching coffee or dictating a day’s worth of calendar events to an executive–but this isn’t the 1980s, and assistants have so much more to offer today. That outdated concept makes it a little hard to come up with all of the ways a virtual assistant can be valuable. They aren’t even there to keep you caffeinated, how good can they really be?
Now think about all of the menial, tiny tasks that take up a truly shocking number of hours for your staff. Specifically, think about the time your staff spends handling the minutia of community maintenance.
There are a lot of important parts to managing a community association. Arguably, one of the most important is staying on top of community maintenances. Supporting boards in fulfilling their fiduciary duty means more than just running numbers. It is the responsibility of all community trustees that their decisions are both financially sound, and contribute to community success, like upholding safety and curb appeal. Right now, most management companies task community managers with maintenance tracking responsibilities. That means they’re spending hours of their time researching vendors, filing paperwork, making phone calls, and fielding the back and forth between community and service provider.
Can they do the work? Absolutely. Your managers are qualified, trained professionals with an intimate knowledge of the industry. They can do anything. But should they be? Not if they can better use those hours elsewhere!
Managing community maintenance tasks doesn’t require the specialties that a certified property manager has to offer. It takes organization, time management, and planning (all of which are important skills!), which is something you can get from the right virtual assistant.
Giving your managers back their workday is simple if you know where to offer support.
When the time comes to start onboarding a new support system for your accounting team, HireSmart Virtual Employees is here to help. Book your 30-min discovery call today to start the process of getting paired with your future HOA Maintenance Coordinator.
Churning is great when it comes to making butter or delicious ice cream, but when it comes to staffing, the less churn the better.
Once we’ve set you up with some excellent staff from HireSmart Virtual Employees, you want your churn rate to resemble a peaceful, placid mountain lake, not a choppy whitecapped rushing river.
Your competitive advantage with low and slow churn can be substantial. While your competitors spend time and money finding, training, and replacing staff, you and your staff are moving forward as a team towards your goals.
As a staffing company, we know exactly how much replacing an employee costs in time and money. And just like “nothing succeeds like success”, it’s also true that staff turnover leads to more staff turnover.
Whether you’re selling a product or a service, the bottom line to success runs through your employees.
According to a Gallup workplace analysis, fifty-two percent of existing employees say that their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job.
And only about a third of former employees said they had a conversation with their manager about leaving before they quit.
Employees leave jobs for all kinds of reasons, many of them out of your control. But what if a simple conversation is all it takes to keep people happily working for you?
The power of a weekly check-in is undeniable. Especially with virtual employees, there is no better way for you to address problems and co-create solutions.
Making the time and space for staff to talk about how things are going at work, to identify frustrations, or just vent about personal issues, will keep you in the know about the challenges they face.
Awareness of the issues or problems is churn prevention.
There are many ways to get your churn rate lower and slower and they are all variations on a single theme. J.W. Marriott says it like this–
“If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers and your business will take care of itself.”
Are you facing the turbulence of churn in your business and want to get a handle on it?
We’ve supported companies through churn – and saved them from being burned. We know how to help you through this process.
If you’re going through heavy staff turnover, or can’t get your team to click, our expertise will help. Book a free consultation here and we’ll guide you out of the churn and into the calm comfort of productive long-term employees.