You never know when a crisis will hit and how severely it will affect day-to-day operations or your residents. You do know that today is as good a day as ever to strategize and start planning your response.
We’ve all gone through crises and challenging situations that really beat us down and made us feel like we’re not producing or performing the way that we need to. This is the same for your frontline teams too. Not only can an emergency impact your team's ability to keep residents safe, a crisis of any size also can have an impact on your bottom line.
I worked onsite and in a corporate office for a regional property manager for five years. During that time I gained a wealth of knowledge on how to deal with such hardship moments. I worked through Hurricane Harvey managing onsite teams and ensuring resident safety. I helped keep teams and communities on track during many localized crises, and I helped educate and train clients during COVID-19 on how they could (and can) maintain business continuity and touchless operations.
Going through situations like that really forces you to take a step back and figure out what can be done. What can we control in the uncontrollable? What can we learn for the next situation?
4 steps to preparedness
What has helped me and my teams through all the unforeseen events and natural disasters is a 4-step process that helps make sure your frontlines are meeting customer needs while keeping safe and still delivering value to the bottom line.
And when we talk about crisis management, it’s not just major pandemics or storms. Things that we learned from these big crises can be tailored to the small hurdles and bumps in the road we face all the time.
Here are the four big call-outs that I’ve learned through crisis management:
- Prepare now
- Rally around resources
- Practice flexibility
- Communicate effectively, efficiently and with empathy
That may sound simple, however anyone who has worked through a crisis onsite knows that these four steps are crucial to keeping your teams, residents and businesses safe.
1. Prepare now
We don’t know what or when the next big crisis is going to be or what shape it will take.
Try to identify things that would really throw a wrench in the major functions that your corporate teams and onsite teams are trying to do in your day-to-day. In a crisis, we need to still do our job every day: What’s going to throw us a hard left?
For example, no one could have thought that one day we’d have to stop touring face-to-face. So, ask yourself, “Okay, if I couldn’t tour face-to-face anymore, what could I do? If I couldn’t call people anymore, what could I do?”
Let your imagination come up with other untold crisis realities and think about how you’d respond.
2. Rally around your resources
Once you identify roadblocks or things that could stop you in your tracks or hinder you from doing your day-to-day core roles, take this time to accrue an arsenal.
During the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, we couldn’t tour face-to-face, because, similar to the pandemic, it wasn’t safe. We rallied during that time, and built out our collateral. That way we were able to give people what they needed, and we were also preparing for the next time.
For example in your day-to-day: Take inventory of your community’s images to make sure you have what is needed to put your property in the best light. Do you have video tours of your models or even of your vacant apartments (if feasible) that you could use?
You can also think about how the crisis can affect your residents. While you still have a business to run, rallying also means being empathetic and showing residents that they’re not just a rent check. They are going through whatever the crisis is just as much as you and your teams are.
One idea to help with residents during a crisis (and one that is good to prepare in advance) is an emergency resident resource guide that includes interim housing options. Do you have any sister properties nearby that could help? What role could the Red Cross play? If we can help them and be a great neighbor to them, that’s just the right thing to do.
3. Practice flexibility
Identify technology that can play an important role during a crisis. Practice Zoom, practice Skype or FaceTime. Make sure you have voicemails and automated responses ready to go for specific scenarios.
Much of the preparedness can be done with many of the tools you have in place already. What do you have available today for you that you could leverage in the case of an emergency? Then, practice using it with your team members.
You should also take the time to asses your tools and evaluate them for how they will help you during a crisis. Can your onsite teams work efficiently at home? How will you communicate quickly and en masse?
4. Communicate effectively, efficiently and with empathy
Building these crisis action plans now gives you more leeway with your time so you can communicate effectively – with empathy – and efficiently to your prospects and your residents. They don’t want a bunch of different or confusing messages.
For example, during Hurricane Harvey, mass texting was the most important tool we had to message our residents. This made sure everybody is receiving the right information at the right time. We also used email templates and quick replies to help people contacting the property understand the situation.
And, once Harvey subsided, we went through our thread of emails and saved everything in order to use them as a crisis preparedness package.
This way, we were prepared and knew exactly what to do, what to say and where to share the most important information the next time around.
I shared more planning tips about how to better prepare your properties and teams for a crisis in a recent video interview.
Is there anything you would add?