Policies and Procedures – The SPANX of Property Management Operations

Yes, you read that correctly. Policies and Procedures are the SPANX of property management operations: the functional, streamlining control panels that make everything else look polished, effortless, and successful. Love them or hate them, they are a necessary component of a high-performing property management company’s strategy. While Policies and Procedures are decidedly unsexy, they provide a foundation and consistency that enable employees at every level to gain competence (and therefore confidence) to perform their responsibilities. They also save dozens of hours per employee per year by defining a standard and expected way of conducting repetitive tasks or processes, instead of having to figure it out each and every time the employee needs to do them. Unfortunately, the last two years seem to have taken a seam ripper to our collective SPANX. (And I’m not talking about the pandemic pounds some of us have acquired through our endless hours of at-home sourdough baking!) At the end of 2021, according to the Swift Bunny Index, nearly 75% of property management employees agreed that Policies and Procedures were consistently enforced by their companies. But midway through 2022, that stat dropped down to 69%. Why is this happening, and why does it matter? During COVID, though Policies and processes changed rapidly – sometimes on a daily basis – companies focused a lot of attention on communicating and reinforcing those updates to ensure all employees understood the expectation. It was challenging and frustrating, but collectively we got pretty good at the “Pivot.” Now that business is…