Most property management leaders spend a lot of time thinking about how to increase the efficiency of their property teams, yet when it comes to the most basic of team functions - daily communication between the corporate office, regional managers, on-site staff, and vendors - most PM teams are operating in the dark ages, inundated by thousands of unread emails, decentralized text messages, and WhatsApp threads on a daily basis.
This communication chaos has become a drag on operational efficiency and has real costs for property management companies.
The State of PM Communication: How Did We Get Here?
Property management is a highly complex, time-sensitive business. Teams may be geographically separate from each other, but at the same time, on-site and office staff need to collaborate to get projects done, share information in real-time, and run any issues up the ladder before they turn into real problems. On top of that, executives need visibility across the entire portfolio to identify challenges and opportunities.
So what happens? Everyone copies everyone on every email - for visibility. Team members need answers right away - so they fire off texts on their personal phones. Teams hack together WhatsApp group chats or Microsoft Teams channels to solve the problem but end up just creating more confusion.
Pretty soon, team members are receiving hundreds of emails a day - or an hour - that they don’t read or spend hours combing through to see if something needs their attention. Everyone is cc’d on emails that aren’t actionable, has their own email filing system, and the actual conversations they do need visibility into are siloed in text messages on team members’ personal phones.
How Communication Chaos Slows Teams Down
There are real operational costs that come with communicating like this day in and day out - and property management leaders are starting to realize that communication chaos is slowing down their businesses.
The first hidden cost is slow response times that lead to slow decision-making. Processes like unit turnovers or renovations are delayed because on-site staff and office staff aren’t communicating in one place about everything that needs to get done. For example, a regional manager sends an email asking for information so they can make a decision, but that email gets buried among 200 other emails. Meanwhile, the information they needed was actually in a group text chat between on-site team members that they were left off of, and had no visibility into. As the days tick by without a clear path forward, the operational costs pile up.
The second issue with siloed, disorganized communication is missed opportunities. One property management company reported that their internal emails have a less than 50% open rate. Email and text simply aren’t built for the collaboration that needs to happen to improve teams and companies. The result is that even though they want their property teams to emulate what is working at other properties, most PM executives can’t actually see what’s going well at the site level, because conversations are siloed and completely disorganized. On the flip side, teams don’t have a place to collaborate and share knowledge besides email, which rarely gets read. Overall, it becomes difficult to grow and improve a business without providing opportunities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
Lastly, when team members are constantly dealing with miscommunication, misunderstandings, and information gaps, it leads to burnout and employee turnover. Waking up every day to an inbox of 300 emails to scan, file, and delete is not only frustrating, but it also inhibits employees from learning and growing in their roles. Making team communication centralized, faster, and more efficient is a good retention strategy; expecting employees to search 25 different group chats in text message chains on their personal phones is not. Improving internal communication is key to combating employee burnout, and ultimately decreases costly employee turnover.
Property management was built on email and texting, but email and texting certainly weren’t built for property management. Hundreds of unread emails and siloed text messages have created an environment where everyone simultaneously has too much unactionable information and too little of the right information. The costs of communication chaos are mounting, and it’s time for property management companies to see improving internal team communication as a key driver of operational efficiency.
