In the crazy world of property management many of us struggle with keeping and empowering our team members. Throughout my years in property management I been asked how I am able to keep long term employees. After sitting down with team members and really looking into myself I have come up with eight key factors that many of us have either overlooked or simply forgotten about.

Think Positive

Everyone should understand the power of positive psychology, look at every situation as a learning opportunity. Your outlook in business and life is shaped by your thought process playing a heavy hand in the way you approach every situation. Negative thoughts breed a pessimistic attitude influencing not only your behavior but also that your team. Everything starts with you, think positive! Often this can be accomplished by shaping your thoughts with your personal “self talk”.  These are those endless thoughts, words and phrases that you say to yourself throughout the day. These come from applying logic and reason, while others come from your bias, perceptions, judgments, and interpretations of information or sometimes more importantly the lack of information. Positive thinking will lead to optimism for yourself and in turn your team.

Honesty, Transparency and Trust

Being honest and transparent with employees is essential to building trust. When your team trusts you, they will go the extra mile for you and the company. At times it can be uncomfortable communicating with your team, be honest and as transparent as possible. Transparency can be difficult to navigate and can be a hard thing to find in the traditional workplace, but it’s a growing trend within forward-thinking companies that pays dividends. Companies with a more transparent culture tend to see increased employee engagement, sales, quality and profits because everyone is able to focus on goal-based initiatives.

Delegation

Understanding your team members strengths and weaknesses is essential when delegating work. Clearly communicating not only expectations but also the “why” work has been delegated. Passing out work content without explanation tends to lead to misplaced animosity, feelings of entitlement or disappointment.

Communicate Effectively

A multitude of problems can arise in an organization when communication is lacking. This underlines just how important it is to improve your team’s communication skills both verbal and nonverbal. Listening can be the most important component of communication that should be consciously developed in our fast-paced world of electronic communications.  Active listening can go a long way to ensuring expectations are met in order to achieve the desired outcome.

Know How To Inspire Employees

Managers tend to run into trouble when employees feel invisible, overlooked, or ignored - which happens all too often. Avoid these feelings by relating to your employees, involve them, build a cohesive team, maintain positive coworker relations. Spending even a short time with team members can help grow a bond.  Great leaders know how to inspire! When big, stressful moments occur, how you react often dictates how individual team members will react when they have their own big moments. How you approach situations matter, by playing devil’s advocate from several different sides will help you understand the situation completely allowing your response to be appropriate. This will help teach them how to think outside the box.

Team Alignment

When cross training, ensure to keep the entire team focused and aligned towards long term goals. Everyone performs their daily work/tasks sometimes losing direction or site of end goals. Make sure everyone understands they are adding to the goal piece by piece, adding building blocks to attain goals and ultimately the organizations vision. 

Build Better Habits

We all have those daily habits that shape how you live your life. If you want your team to be productive, energetic, and happy they need to do something each day that pushes them in that direction. You can help build betters habits by enabling and supporting endeavors that will have a positive impact on their lives.

Employees need to feel valued and appreciated, given feedback, provided with growth opportunities, given work-life balance options, and have trust and confidence in their leaders.  All of these strategies are beneficial when an employer wants to keep employees within an organization and keep employee turnover costs low.