Here’s a scenario not unfamiliar to property professionals in today’s marketplace: the budget is being squeezed even tighter and on the chopping block is staff training (again), the energy-saving retrofit that has a mere two-year payback but has been postponed for three years, and two staff positions. Oh, and another tenant has asked to “negotiate” their upcoming renewal. With the challenges commercial real estate professionals are facing, sometimes managing a building’s “human” assets can be left on autopilot.
The Little Things
When monetary incentives such as bonuses, raises or even cost of living increases are slashed, managers are faced with building motivation with seemingly empty hands. This is a time when a simple but genuine “thank you,” “good job” or inexpensive gift token can have a tremendous impact on morale. Notes Marc Fischer with Transwestern, “You have to genuinely appreciate the people who work for you. And yes, those folks would love a trip to the Caribbean or a $1,000 bonus, but often just a sincere thank you or a Starbucks gift card can mean the world.” Fischer shares several inexpensive ways to “thank you” that can go a long way
- Thank You from the Top. If someone on your team does something exceptional, ask the president of your company to send that individual a signed thank you note congratulating them on a job well done.
- Score Points at Home. Don’t stop at thanking an employee for a great job; also consider sending a note home to a spouse, partner or parent. Tell them how much their loved one means to the company, thank them for sharing him/her during an especially busy time, and offer a gift card for a family dinner out “on the company.”
- Make it Personal. When recognizing an individual for a job well done, make a point to tailor it to his or her interests or needs. An employee who has a daughter graduating from school, might love a comp day around a graduation weekend. Another employee who’s a sports fan might appreciate complimentary tickets to a local sporting event.
- Be Specific. When publicly recognizing excellence, a “good job team” is nice, but to make it really special, point out specifically what a team or person did to merit praise.
- Catch Someone doing Something Right. Keep gift cards handy that you can give employees on the spot when they “get caught doing something right.” The free coffee or lunch the gift card buys is nice, but from a morale standpoint, the recognition is priceless.
It’s Impossible to Over Communicate
It’s when the news is bleakest, or might appear to be, that managers and companies need to revisit the fundamentals of leadership, regardless of any stress they might be under themselves. Anthony LoPinto, managing director & CEO of Equinox Partners, an executive search firm focused exclusively on the real estate industry, is finding that something that would seem to be very basic is tripping up more than a few real estate companies as they attempt to lead their way through the recession. “The single most significant issue that companies are grappling with is communicating effectively with employees,” says LoPinto, who recently participated in Cornell University’s Real Estate Conference where communication, or the lack thereof, was brought up time and again as a barrier between management and staff, especially when it came to issues of retention. “Be transparent,” stresses LoPinto. “In my experience it’s the rare executive or leadership that is enlightened in this area. The effective communicators are having a much better time managing the motivational issues within a company.”
Communicating to staff that layoffs or benefit reductions are imminent is an unpleasant part of any manager’s job, but transparency and honesty may translate to increased respect and even productivity from staff that might be under performing due to anxiety or stress. “If you’re in a situation where there aren’t going to be bonuses or raises, you have to be honest and upfront,” explains P. Marc Fischer, senior vice president, director, Management Services, Transwestern. “A lot of people don’t want to deliver bad news so they don’t say anything, but then people start gossiping and talking. You have to continually have the conversation about what’s positive and negative. People are on edge, especially if they have seen friends or relatives laid off, and you have to let them know what’s going on.”
“Do more with less” is one communication being heard loud and clear by employees, and some are finding this “mantra of management” to be overwhelming and hard to meet. Efficiency improvement requests, though essential, are often met with a groan when decreed from the top down. Smart leaders will ask employees to suggest ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs. This bottom-up approach can create buy-in from the team, especially when there’s some incentive involved. Notes Fischer, “It pays off to ask employees to help find efficiencies, and it pays to offer a percentage of the savings back to the employee.”
Constructive communication can come in a variety of ways — staff meetings, one-one-one discussions, a communication from the president, and sometimes it needs to come in several ways. Chief Operating Officer of Advance Realty, Kurt R. Padavano, communicates with staff on a daily basis, and to ensure that no one is missed, he sends out a monthly email update to everyone in the company, highlighting market conditions as well as what’s happening across the Advance Realty portfolio. “The summary level communication is critical,” explains Padavano. “There are a lot of employees in different departments and they may not follow the industry in the Wall Street Journal or on GlobeSt.com. They need to know what is going on in the company, and how the economy is impacting our business plan. They also need to know how leadership is going to direct the company and position it for recovery.”
The Human Asset
At Berkshire Property Advisors, a multi-family investment and management firm headquartered in Boston, staff morale and retention has steadily increased since 2003 and is holding strong despite the broader market trauma in the residential sector over the past couple years. The secret of their success is a progressive employee survey system that has helped to establish a culture aimed at motivating and satisfying employees. Dan Stravinksi, senior vice president of Human Resources at Berkshire, instituted the program shortly after he joined the company in 2002 and thinks it works because it both empowers employees and makes them accountable. “We wanted to be proactive and customer oriented, so we came up with 13 dimensions that measure how we are doing and what we should be doing,” explains Stravinski. “This allowed us to determine where the gaps are.” The company surveys its employees annually on the 13 dimensions, which make up the Elements of Berkshire Property Advisors Culture. The elements range from “vision of future” and “clarity of goals” to “teamwork” and “work/life balance.” When the first surveys were administered in 2003, the results revealed gaps as large as three points on a 10-point scale, now Berkshire is at a gap of one or less on all 13 dimensions. “Our turnover went down significantly between 2003 and 2009,” says Stravinksi, “and we were reducing turnover even during the good times.”
Landing a Job in a Distressed Market
Smart companies help their employees broaden their skill set to allow for a transference of skills when times are tight (like now) and employees are asked to work beyond their area of expertise. Individuals should be thinking about their professional development in the same way and be prepared to “reinvent” themselves should the need arise. Says Anthony LoPinto, managing director & CEO of Equinox Partners, “If you’re a developer looking for a job, you’ll find there’s not much development work right now. Reinvention is part of the game. You need to step back and look at your background pre-development, maybe you worked in asset management earlier in your career. You’ll need to re-orient your resume to highlight other experience.”
Below are more tips from “A Field Guide to a Job Search,” a resource put out by LoPinto and Equinox Partners with advice for individuals searching for a job during “challenging and dramatically changing times.”
- Relevance. Demonstrate how your work experience is relevant and can help address many of the problems (and opportunities) real estate firms are facing today.
- Results. When developing your resume, focus on results rather than responsibilities. A prospective employer is more interested in what you actually accomplished than in what you were supposed to accomplish.
- Network. Network and keep in touch with your existing relationships and important contacts and participate in industry events that give you the opportunity to network with a large number of executives. Check out Ken Ferazzi’s “Never Eat Alone” about building a community of colleagues, contacts, friends and mentors.
- Link Up. Social networking sites like LinkedIn(www.linkedincom) are becoming powerful tools for posting your resume and credentials in a way that makes it easy for potential employers, recruiters, business partners or clients to contact you.
- Define your Online. Be sure to concentrate your job search on industry-specific niche sites that have relationships with all of the major industry associations that “power” their career centers. The Select Leaders career site focuses on real estate jobs.
- Be thoughtful. If you land an interview, make yourself stand out from the other candidates by taking the time to do the small, thoughtful things that employers will remember — send a thank you card after the interview or forward an interesting article that relates to your discussions.
An important dimension to the employee survey system is a property manager feedback questionnaire that allows employees to rank the performance of their managers across a broad range of expectations, with property managers held accountable for low rankings and rewarded for excellent rankings. The system also has a message center where any employee can post questions to management and expect to get an answer. Stravinksi notes that the system is not unique to residential or commercial real estate. “It goes back to how to manage people 101,” says Stravinski. “Attention is often focused on physical assets in real estate instead of the human assets that are responsible for creating value. Smart companies realize that if they consider their human capital in the same way, they will get good returns.”
Professional Development in a Recession
At Shorenstein Realty Services, an investment and property management firm in San Francisco, the human asset is top of mind as the company is taking the somewhat unique approach to actually investing in its employees during the recession. At the beginning of 2009, Shorenstein executives did a national property tour to meet face-to-face with employees, service advisors and their tenant customers. “We explained what was happening at the macro level as well as the micro levels, we asked them how we’re doing and we came away with lots of good ideas,” says Stanley Roualdes, director of property management and construction at Shorenstein.
Some of those good ideas have meant the company is rethinking and reinvesting in training and education. “We have actually added very senior positions to address training and education and we have reworked all of our business training modules to make them more user friendly and Web enabled.” Through the BEEP (BOMA Energy Performance Program) alone, more than 100 Shorenstein employees have been trained. Shorenstein is in not burdened with the crushing debts that might keep other companies from investing in staff and training, but they are also not “sitting on assets,” so to speak, and waiting for a recovery. They are making the human investment now to be better positioned when the market turns. This strategy also keeps employees busy and learning during the slow cycle and helps buoy moral. For Roualdes, the decision to invest in and promote staff during a recession is an easy one, especially if it means employees will spend less time worrying about job security and more time concentrating on customers and business. “I want them out in the building meeting with customers,” stresses Roualdes. “Now, especially, when everyone is struggling to maintain occupancy levels, we want them talking to tenants in advance.”
Even for organizations not in the enviable position to invest significant funds and resources in human capital, which is the vast majority of commercial real estate firms, staff development should still be an absolute priority. Budgets may be slashed, but there are low-cost ways to ensure that training is not dropped—from hosting luncheon Webinars where 20 employees can participate in a seminar for a flat fee, to asking a vendor or an in-house expert to instruct a course. Down markets are often a good time to build business and innovate around outstanding employees and team members. For Fischer, times like these present excellent opportunities to evaluate your team. “When things are going really well and you’re making money hand over fist, you keep hiring people. Three years ago it was very hard to find qualified people so you may have hired people less qualified. Now is the time to reevaluate and separate your strong players, those who can be developed, from your weaker players.”
Now is also the time to lay out a career and development path for your star performers. “This is no time to take your eye off the ball,” Fischer emphasizes. “Poaching is alive and well and it’s entirely possible that somebody is going to steal talent from you. In many cases, what keeps those star performers on your team is showing them a career progression in the company.” Conversely, knowing that many companies are cutting benefits and pay, managers should stay closely tuned to the market for talent that might be seeking a new home.
Ultimately, the manager that makes leadership a priority by communicating and listening to staff will have an enormous advantage today and a year from today. The manager with the “they should just be thankful to have a job,” attitude that allows leadership to slip into cruise control could be in for an unpleasant awakening when the industry recovers and half the staff has left. Differentiating between good management and good leadership is key. “A lot of people are good managers, they can get a project done or handle business operations well, but great leadership is a requirement for getting through a cycle like this,” says Padavano. “It’s about long-term vision and strategy and conducting yourself by example in how hard you work and your commitment to employees and clients.”
