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Effective training for property management is the cornerstone to building a knowledgeable, engaged team that drives success for your communities and reduces employee turnover. However, for all the work that goes into attracting qualified candidates, it’s natural to feel tapped out when it comes to expanding or improving your employee training and development programs.
In this ever-changing employment landscape, many leaders are likely beginning to feel weighed down by all the “need” for change. But take note because there are important changes you can make that require minimal effort to implement. While many factors are at play in retaining top talent, a quality onboarding program, followed by a robust employee development program, plays an important role.
Here’s the good news: Small changes to “how” you develop and train your property management and onsite staff can lead to deeper engagement and minimize churn. And that’s a win-win for everyone!
10 Quick Tips to Better Training for Property Management in Multifamily
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- Create a Solid Onboarding
- Align Training To Support Your Corporate Culture
- Set Clear Training Goals
- Understand Employees’ Skill Levels
- Tailor Training for Your Organization
- View Training as an Investment
- Consider Multimedia
- Match Employee Needs With Right-Size Training
- Follow-Up on Training
- Make Sure Training Materials Are Centralized
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1. Create a Solid Onboarding
Properly training new employees is essential. Develop onboarding processes tailored to the unique aspects of property management, such as leasing protocols and compliance requirements. Include hands-on practice with leasing and maintenance processes to ensure new hires gain a comprehensive understanding of their roles. A solid onboarding program will make new employees’ transitions easier and reduce turnover risk.
Looking for more? Check out our ebook, “Onboarding Done Right: 8 Proven Elements That Empower and Engage.”
2. Align Training To Support Your Corporate Culture
To help employees “walk the walk,” not just “talk the talk,” it’s crucial to create a training environment that helps employees know and understand what drives your corporate culture.
In your property management training, incorporate real-life scenarios that reflect your organization’s core values, such as resident-first service or sustainability initiatives. For example, include industry-specific training on effective communication during resident conflicts or role-playing exercises emphasizing community-building values.
A positive company culture helps create a cohesive, productive, and satisfied team; all training for property management should support and align with it. When done right, training and culture work hand-in-hand to support and grow teams.
3. Set Clear Training Goals
Before beginning a training session, make sure goals for the trainee — and the training itself — are clearly communicated. Be specific! Define what you hope to accomplish with your property management training, such as increasing lease conversion rates, reducing resident turnover, or achieving compliance related to local housing laws. Whatever your focus, share these objectives with trainees so they understand how the training directly contributes to their success and the property’s performance.
4. Understand Employees’ Skill Levels
Knowing an employee’s skill level prevents property management training that may be either too advanced or redundant and ensures training is effective and empowering. Use assessments or one-on-one evaluations to gauge an employee’s experience with Fair Housing compliance, rent collection, or property inspections.
Surveys and mystery shopping are the most impactful measures for gathering insight into employee performance. With clear and unbiased feedback, you can develop targeted training solutions that actually help close skill gaps and improve your team’s overall performance.
Concerned about Fair Housing violations? Download this free infographic for the 10 most common mistakes and how to avoid them!
5. Tailor Training for Your Organization
Consider the diverse roles in multifamily — leasing agents, maintenance staff, and property managers — and customize training content accordingly. Cookie-cutter training modules are boring, quickly checked off, and then forgotten.
Impactful training is more than just a “one-and-done” task. Tailoring your training to employee preferences and skill needs makes you more likely to keep employees engaged. And choosing an appropriate training platform, whether virtual, instructor-led, or self-paced online, provides a more effective outcome. Here’s the good news: Grace Hill has what you need to become the training hero for your teams!
6. View Training as an Investment
It costs money to train employees well, but it is also costly to replace and train a revolving door of staff, so approach it as an investment in the company’s future because a well-trained team directly impacts your property’s profitability and reputation.
Did you know: According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 76% of employees say they are more likely to stay with a company that offers continuous training. Grace Hill has a calculator to help you quantify the true cost of turnover — check it out!
The flip side is that property management training, when done well, is linked to measurable outcomes like higher resident retention rates, improved maintenance response times, and reduced legal liabilities — all of which lead to a positive return on investment.
7. Consider Multimedia
Employees likely will be more engaged if their training is interactive and not just a person reading from a slide or notes. Video or other media-type platforms help engage employees from the start.
Look for a training solution provider that incorporates multimedia tools with role-specific modules and share webinar resources to provide timely updates on a wide range of topics. Both help make learning engaging and relevant.
Another idea to “gamify” employees’ training experiences is to offer awards and leaderboards for achievement and recognition. Grace Hill’s PerformanceHQ Training solution makes training fun with performance broadcasting features like milestone awards and dynamic leaderboards that provide added incentives encouraging learners to participate and engage.
8. Match Employee Needs With Right-Size Training
Your employees have busy schedules, including interacting with residents, and they are invested in doing the work you hired them to do. So make sure your property management training fits within the demands of their day.
Don’t create one long training session. Break it up into small, highly focused pieces of content – also known as microlearning – so that it fits more easily into their schedules and doesn’t create additional stress or a feeling of overwhelm.
Research shows that short training sessions spaced out over time lead to better knowledge retention. With spaced repetition, people can remember about 80% of what has been learned after 60 days — a significant improvement.
To help combat the forgetting curve, Grace Hill uses a short-course format (each training session is between 10 and 20 minutes) and offers quick boosters (between 5 and 10 minutes) on critical topics that can be assigned over time. This approach respects employees’ busy schedules and reinforces key skills on demand.
Need help establishing a healthy learning culture? We can help!
9. Follow-Up on Training
Measuring success using qualitative or quantitative markers is imperative. The only way to know if your training is successful is to provide follow-up, feedback, and support to the trainee.
Create a follow-up plan that includes quizzes on Fair Housing rules, mystery shopper evaluations of leasing staff, or post-training surveys to assess confidence levels in dealing with residents. Use this feedback to refine your training to address any gaps.
10. Make Sure Training Materials Are Centralized
Employees will be less engaged with training if they struggle to find training material. Utilize a centralized platform like a multifamily property management-specific learning management system (LMS) where employees can easily access training resources, including compliance checklists, resident interaction guidelines, or maintenance troubleshooting videos. Ensure materials are mobile-friendly for on-the-go learning. Better yet, provide a mobile experience that makes training easy to complete at any time and on any device.
Training for Property Management Personnel
— a Worthwhile Investment
Yes, a few of these require an investment of time, talent, and resources, but others can be implemented immediately with little or no expense.
While the current state of turnover in multifamily can leave Property Managers feeling fatigued by change, an introspective look into “the way we’ve always done it” often shows change was needed long before now.
Implementing best practices backed by sound learning science research is good for employees, but don’t overlook the benefit it also brings to your organizational health and the overall bottom line.
If the purpose of onboarding and employee development training for property management is truly to empower and engage employees, build a vibrant corporate culture, instill loyalty, and help advance skills and abilities, then it’s important to do it well.
Training Tips Takeaway
In the wise words of Henry Ford, “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”
So, what changes do you need to make to ensure your employees aren’t left feeling stagnant? Do you have a learning management system that engages employees, helps them achieve new goals, and builds confidence in their performance?
If not, why not? Are you willing to risk having employees leave because someone else is willing to invest in their advancement? Recent studies are clear: A robust training program is critical in the ever-changing multifamily landscape.
Ready to explore training for your team? Talk to a Grace Hill expert and get started today!
