We all need to do just a little bit more with a little bit less right now to remain competitive. Investors are waiting to see what the next couple of months are going to look like, and in an already slow season for new owner onboarding, it is more tempting than ever to forego adding staff or even replacing staff that is moving on right now.
However, we know you also don't want to overwhelm your current staff—and have the quality of the property management services you provide decline.
This makes finding smart ways to increase productivity via property management tools—without decreasing your level of service—the name of the game!
Here are five tips our staff at Geekly Media use to increase our business productivity that you can start applying right away!
When there is too much to do—and not enough time to do it—it becomes easy for 'task paralysis' to set in. Task paralysis is when a person is overwhelmed by their list to the point of not being able to start or make decisive decisions about their day.
Not everyone deals with this—but some of your top-performing staff members might struggle with it without you even knowing! Even if your staff isn't paralyzed by their to-do lists, having a clear prioritization process is going to make everything work more smoothly.
This is a very simple way to ensure everything is done when it needs to be done, instead of in the order it is emailed to someone, for example.
Without strong, trackable communication methods for your team, assumptions drive task authority—and we all know what they say about assumptions.
You've got a hierarchy in your company, and it begins when you hire the right people for the right seats. Part of leveling up as a company is learning to let go of the things you no longer need to do personally, regardless of where you are on the company ladder.
That can be challenging for someone newly promoted and the seasoned alike. After all, we know exactly what to expect from our own work product—but we don't necessarily know if the person we're handing it off to is going to do it how you need it done. This is where having a delegation process and toolset comes in handy.
When you work in an interconnected ecosystem like HubSpot (or many other project management programs), you're able to assign tasks to other staff members and then have a place where the work for those tasks is stored and monitored. This allows you to effectively provide the guidance your staff needs—without them knocking on your door asking for help randomly throughout the day.
We all know that random office pop-ins ruin your productivity and throw off your 'flow.' This makes it a lot easier for delegation to occur—and for the right eyes to stay on the tasks.
There are some great tools out there that are perfect for one job and not another. For example, email is amazing to keep us connected and to keep a history of communication between coworkers and clients alike. Unfortunately, email is now a tool that kills productivity because it is not the catch-all that everyone uses it to be.
Some things could be a phone call or a ticket in a ticketing system. In fact, 'Create a Ticket' (or CAT) is something you'll hear around the Geekly Media office all the time (and our clients' offices too). There's a good reason for this: an email is hard to track when it becomes a complicated chain, difficult to prioritize, and is messy. Unless you're creating a PDF and attaching it to a client folder—or worse, printing it and adding it to a physical folder—it isn't organized perfectly, even if you're the master of inbox organization. Tickets are a crucial property management tool that solves for this.
Just as you wouldn't use the wrong tool for rent collection, there are a ton of tools that don't fit the job right in any given scenario. If you have a process in your business that feels like it is not properly streamlined, take the time to find the right solution. A little time now will save you a lot of time later!
We're a property management process automation company, so of course we're going to add this—but it has to be said. If there is something a bit of code or software can do for you better, faster, and in a way that gives you actionable data to work with, we just can't see why you wouldn't want to embrace it!
You probably already use automation in your daily life and trust it to make every minute more convenient—and this applies to work as well. If you:
You already trust automation! Letting this into your business is the next step to having more freedom—and better results.
At the most basic level, using automation for sales and marketing in your CRM for emails is a must. Thankfully, so much of property management is a business-as-usual function—meaning process automation can be integrated into sales, new owner onboarding, move-ins, move-outs, collections, and more.
Finally, 'What gets measured, gets managed'—which is why reporting is so crucial to productivity. If you have the numbers, it is far easier to identify bottlenecks and help your staff prioritize, delegate, automate, and use the right property management tools.
We're really proud of the enhanced reporting dashboards that we build for the property management companies that automate with us. These dashboards give you not only the birds-eye view but allow you to drill into departments, processes, and individual staff members—so you can locate and fix productivity issues at the root.
Get in touch with us for a one-on-one session to see if we can help you increase your productivity!