Commercial property maintenance managers and jugglers are a lot alike.
There are many moving parts and you can’t drop the ball. There’s so much stuff to do and so many people to please. The landlord, your superiors, your clients, your clients‘ employees, the contractors… And on top of that, you are constantly running between sites you oversee. No matter how much you love your job, we know it can be exhausting to coordinate this great orchestra.
How big this orchestra is exactly? In 2020, the commercial real estate market was worth almost 32 trillion dollars – and property maintenance managers are the ones who keep that value up. In UK alone, there are more than 377 000 people working in property maintenance.
Many challenges come with the territory. We at Resco specialize in helping people work better with digital property maintenance solution Property+ while being out in the field. Let’s identify the common pains and find a way to reduce them.
Keeping track of anything and everything
As a property maintenance manager, you tend to receive a lot of information in various forms – e-mails from clients, messaging apps from colleagues, voicemail from maintenance staff, even post-its on your desk. Not having a consistent way of tracking tasks is a major pain. It’s frustrating to go through many different apps and tools just to learn you missed something.
The first thing you can do is to reduce the channels you’re available on. Set a boundary with your team – no post-its, no Messenger chats. The second thing is to have your staff, contractors, and colleagues report to you in a consistent way that’s easily digestible even in huge quantities. This is super easy with Resco’s checklists – you can create checklist templates that fit your needs. No more data mess.
Property Management Checklist
Download a free Property Management Checklist template for use during a building inspection to meet the customer and regulatory requirements
Holding your team accountable
This applies not just to colleagues but to contractors as well. No clear processes mean no accountability. The task becomes a hot potato. How do you get rid of hot potatoes? Create clear processes. Set up triggers and define jobs triggered by them – and communicate that to your team.
For example: You received a complaint from one of your clients – air conditioning in their office isn’t working properly. That’s a trigger. The following task is to „check the AC“. Performing the check-up triggers another task: „report findings“.
The cooling unit needs cleaning. You call in a contractor and they report what was fixed. Without consistent reporting, this could turn into an e-mail/voicemail/post-it mess. With our checklists, it’s a walk in a park.
Working with the latest information about the sites
Even with consistent reports and easy-to-follow processess, having a bird’s-eye view can be a challenge. Overwhelmed by day-to-day tasks, you can lose track of the big picture. Having a single source of truth is crucial, especially when you report to your higher-ups.
That won’t happen with paper documents or e-mails. So how do you boil down a month worth of work into a one hour meeting? By focusing on outcomes, not tasks. The owners of the buildings usually see no value in listing everything you had to do – they want to know if a problem came up and whether you handled it properly.
Use checklists to make the pain go away
With digital checklists, you won’t ever lose track of who broke what. Or how many days it took to take care of that faulty HVAC unit. Or why is the lift always getting stuck on the 5th floor. You have to juggle so many tasks and manage so many people that at the end of the day, the only thing you can really rely on are your reports. They are the point of reference, the source of truth.
What’s more, you can download them for free, or you can talk to our specialists about having your own, custom, cloud-synced checklists. Reduce chaos, streamline processes, and make everyone a little bit happier.
Explore and download Resco Property+ solution to master digital reporting in your property operations.