As the labour market is becoming increasingly competitive, companies are making increasingly bold offers – as such, employee loyalty is unlikely to improve over the coming years.
Property management teams are noticing this and often find themselves hiring new staff to replace people who’ve left. This puts huge pressure on companies – property managers are finding it difficult to keep up with their workload and asset managers are forced to deal with increased mistakes and project delays.
Therefore, company leadership and team managers are looking for ways to increase employee retention – there are a few ways they can do this.
But before we go into that, let’s look at the reasons why an employee leaves a company.
What Causes High Employee Turnover?
A quick Google search results in countless lists of causes for employee turnover. It’s such a complex matter that employers might wonder whether they should bother fighting employee turnover at all.
To create some clarity, we’ve selected three main reasons why employees leave a company:
Workload is too high – too many projects and too many emails
Employee’s skills and talents are not being recognised by management
Vague monthly/quarterly goals and no clear career path
Inaction is the Most Costly Action
It might seem like employee satisfaction is hard to achieve in the commercial real estate industry – you might say some people just seem less suited for the fast-paced, high stress environment that is commercial real estate.
Granted, most property managers do get their work done – even if they have to move heaven and earth to do it, are hugely overworked and have management breathing down their necks at every turn. They tend to soldier on and get the job done!
But that doesn’t mean employee dissatisfaction isn’t a problem, as for employers it means increased costs related to constant recruitment and training.
Most property managers just can’t afford to let this eat into their profits – so they have to take action in order to protect their margins.
How can you Increase Employee Satisfaction?
According to Deloitte, the main reasons why an employee stays with a company are:
- The company offers a good pay package
- The work is challenging
- There is a clear career path
Getting these right, generates a huge potential payoff for employers. Unfortunately, these solutions have two major problems:
- They can be costly
- They are often outside the control of property managers and their team leads
The Number One Solution to Increase Employee Retention
There might not be a magic bullet to solve the employee retention issue – but there is one way to touch upon many employee grievances without needing to overhaul your company or completely change the way you work.
This is it the solution:
Increased use of technology.
For a property management business, this usually means implementing advanced property management tools.
Employees (especially the younger generation) are used to having tech solutions around – they tend to use a multitude of apps on their phones, laptops and other devices. It makes their lives easier and saves them time, so why wouldn’t they want this at their place of work too?
A robust project management system helps employees with:
- Workload: Good project management tools help you and your team members manage workload – you’ll have a clear overview of ongoing projects and can spot problems early.
- Employee recognition: Employees can easily track the work they’re doing and share this with management. If an employee’s doing well, management will know.
- Goal setting and career progression: A project management tool has goal setting functions built in, which then can feed into an employee’s personal targets and career progress.
Technology – when implemented correctly – can ease employee pains, making their work less arduous and more efficient, which in turn makes them want to stick around for longer and work harder. And it does this at a fraction of the cost of constant recruitment and training.
