In an industry known for a poor work/life balance, this company is the worst for that I have worked for in my 20 years in the business. The sheer volume of admin busy work and time demands from corporate departments virtually guarantees late nights regularly. Managing a community here is the ultimate example of how inefficient technology can actually make an organization. Yesterday was a fairly typical day email wise so I went back and counted up the emails I got either auto-generated or from someone in a position in corporate and averaged it out over the 480 minutes a day that constitute a work day. What I saw was that I received a corporate generated email on average every 7.6 minutes. That doesn’t include emails from vendors, residents, prospects or my team just corporate. Never mind the time it takes to handle whatever the email is about, this means that more than half of the workday is spent simply reading new emails from corporate to determine if action is needed. Add to that how locked down permissions are in the management software severely limiting the ability to delegate many things an assistant could normally handle on a property and there is another way the technology works against efficiently running the property.
The company has also placed a lot of technology responsibilities in the hands of the service team. Technology they are largely unfamiliar with and very uncomfortable using. This results in a lot of time wasted for both maintenance as they struggle to work with systems traditionally handled by the office team and for the manager who is frequently interrupted to assist them in using technology. To quote one of my techs: ‘if I wanted to spend all day on a computer and email I would have gone to work in an office instead of unclogging people’s toilets! And I wouldn’t have to be on call. I do maintenance because I don’t want to work on a computer.’
Aside from the work life balance the other con I would say is not feeling very valued by the company. Average annual pay increase percentages are the lowest I’ve been able to give my staff of any company I’ve worked with in my career. At the same time, my employees living onsite receive annual renewal increases higher than the increase in pay effectively reducing their income each year instead of increasing it. Meanwhile, of the dozen other company’s I have worked for in the business if an employee moved in onsite their rent stayed the same as long as they stayed in that particular apartment and remained working at the property. That absence of rent increases versus living elsewhere has traditionally been one of the positive trade offs of living onsite where you never really leave work. It’s hard to feel like the company values the people taking care of it’s assets when that is their reality.
