Solving the Apartment Industry's Big Staffing Problems with Tiny Steps

Hiring, retention and employee engagement are big problems for many apartment operators. Solving them, however, can be done incrementally by taking smaller, simpler steps.

A panel of apartment leaders spoke of this strategy—going for singles instead of home runs—during a session at the National Multifamily Housing Council’s OpTech Conference in National Harbor, Md.

Laurel Zacher, Vice President, Marketing and Talent Development, Security Properties Residential; David Scharfenberg, Senior Vice President of Operations, Waterton; and Jen Piccotti, Chief Learning Officer, Swift Bunny; discussed strategy with moderator Kendall Pretzer, CEO, Grace Hill.

The pandemic created great unease among apartment industry workers at all levels. A survey by Swift Bunny taken about a year ago showed that one in five regional vice president staff, when asked if they planned to stay in their jobs, said, “I don’t know.”

For property managers, it was one in four.

“Imagine all of a sudden losing one-quarter of your property managers,” Piccotti said. “That would be terrifying.”

About one-third of employees surveyed said they did not feel safe and about 75 percent said their companies didn’t provide all the resources they needed to do their jobs, Piccotti said.

Sounding Off with Town Hall Meetings

Companies began working to regain their employees’ confidence by increasing communications to their employees about the state of play in their companies regarding operations during the pandemic. These regular calls, sometimes in the form of open town hall meetings, with the highest level of management, continue.

“‘I wish my company would stop telling me about what’s going on’ is a comment you’ll never hear an employee say,” Pretzer said. “Nor will they say, ‘My company is invested in my career way too much.’”

Piccotti said maintenance technicians can be the last to know because many don’t have company emails and feel they are left in the dark about policies.

Scharfenberg said it can be a bit intimidating for C-suite leaders to put themselves out there for all their employees to see and to be put on the spot by their employees. “But if a question is asked and they don’t have the answer, there’s nothing wrong with telling them, ‘I’ll get back to you on that.’ ” he said. “The important thing is that you listen to your employees. Listening goes a long way in building trust.”

“It’s not the loudest voice in the conversation that is most important, it’s the collective voice of many,” Piccotti said. She noted that one company surveyed in 2020 had 57 percent of its entire workforce saying it “didn’t know” if it would return. Seeing that, the company began having regular town-hall meetings and in three months the rate dropped to 27 percent.

Zacher agreed that involving the staff on operational policies and decisions can be beneficial.

“We created a safety and compliance team in 2020,” she said, “but with things like policies, they are only as good as their adoption rate. Getting buy-in is key.”

Piccotti said employee retention and performance go hand-in-hand when the staff members know and understand their purpose for their job at the company.

Rising Wages

With rising wages, the panel spoke of how supporting employees can be more crucial than paying above-market salaries.

“We’ve been raising wages,” Scharfenberg said. “But you have to look at the entire package; the total experience. You can provide specialized training based on the employee’s position or their goal of moving to a different or higher-level job at the company.”

But compensation does matter. Piccotti said experienced maintenance technicians (the most challenging position for companies to hire these days) are growing disgruntled when they see companies bringing on inexperienced techs and paying them salaries similar to what the multi-year veterans are making.

Waterton also has begun offering Blueboard Experiential Rewards to employees. Instead of an all-cash performance bonus, the program offers curated experiences such as weekend getaways that can drive long-term engagement impact. Employees associate fond memories of their Blueboard experience directly with their achievement at their companies.