Swift Bunny: Employee Feedback Surveys For The Multifamily Industry With Kara Rice And Jen Piccotti

A true teacher would never tell you what to do. But he would give you the knowledge with which you could decide what would be best for you to do. In this episode, Kara Rice and Jen Piccotti from Swift Bunny share their insights on providing feedback to help the company grow and move forward. Employee feedback survey provides knowledge for leaders on how their employees are in the company and takes action to minimize employee turnover and maximize productivity. At Swift Bunny, they focus on employee engagement to have a rich wealth of knowledge to understand the trends within the industry. Tune in to this insightful episode with Kara Rice and Jen Piccotti today!

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Swift Bunny: Employee Feedback Surveys For The Multifamily Industry With Kara Rice And Jen Piccotti

In this episode, I have not one but two guests. My guests are Kara Rice and Jen Piccotti. Welcome to the show, ladies.

Thank you so much for having us.

Thank you, Adrian. It's a pleasure to be here. Hey, Jen.

Hello.

I wanted to say this is not the only premier that I have had two guests on the show at once, but also this is Jen's first time here. Welcome to the show, Jen.

Thanks so much for having me. I have been enjoying all of your content and everything that you're producing for our industry for such a long time. This is a thrill.

It's a real pleasure to have you on. Also, Kara was the first person that accepted the invitation to come on my show. The very first episode that I had on Multifamily Chronicles was with Kara. I'm very grateful for that.

Me too. It's such an honor for you to tap me for that. It's a compliment that you invited me back. Thank you, Adrian.

It's always great to have you on. There's always so much the industry needs to hear from you both. I want to get started with you, Jen. I want to ask you to tell our readers a little bit about some great things that you have going on at Swift Bunny.

At Swift Bunny, we are focused on feedback for the multifamily industry. For the past few years, we have been focused on employee engagement and understanding what's working, what's not working, what are the greatest challenges, and what are the greatest benefits of being an employee within the multifamily space. We're working with a lot of companies and helping them get employee feedback to help them be better.

We now have over 10,000 employees participating in employee feedback surveys. We have such a rich wealth of knowledge and understanding of trends within our industry that I'm excited about helping companies not only be able to hold on to their great employees but also have a better understanding of how to attract new employees, which is great. Now, we are moving into the resident survey space so we're going to have engagement on a variety of sides within our industry.

It's very exciting to see how your company evolves and grows, not just from a business perspective but from a perspective of covering so many areas in multifamily. This type of service was so much needed because I learned that employee surveys could be tricky and not tell a full story, but when they're well administrated and questions were asked the right way, then you could get a wealth of knowledge of information from your employees. Kara, do you disagree or agree?

You are exactly right. One of the key elements there is using a third party to administer those surveys because it helps the survey participant or the employee to feel safe in being able to share their honest feedback. That is critically important because if you want candid input from your team members, they have to be able to offer that in a safe space so that helps.

The other thing that we think is so important is this has to be ongoing because you can't send a survey out once every year or once every two years, which is commonly done in our industry, and expect that you're going to get the level of feedback that you need. You've got to be doing it frequently, especially when you consider a couple of things, the high turnover in our business. Somebody that you surveyed last December 2022, for example, how likely are they going to be there next December? It's crazy that you wouldn't check in with team members in the interim.

The other thing is that circumstances change. You may be perfectly content on site one month, but then the next month, you've got massive move-outs or a high-leasing season. Circumstances change and all of that impacts the employee experience. Those are a couple of reasons why we think it's imperative to be constantly in communication and getting that input from your team members.

I couldn't say it better. Circumstances change. I'm only thinking of one thing that I'm very passionate about and focused on. It's the labor market. The labor market shifts overnight. You wake up one morning and it's a different labor market. It has been shifting so much for the past few years. When that changes, people's circumstance change. Their view of certain topics changes. Their life changes. Everything changes. For us, to have this static view to look and say, “This is what our employees thought about us several months ago.” It is not beneficial for us as employers because that information becomes obsolete fast. Jen, do you disagree?

You're right. Data has a shelf life. I feel like the shelf life is getting shorter and shorter by the month. The benefit of being able to get this ongoing feedback is not only are you getting an understanding of what's happening right now, but oftentimes, they'll start signaling what may be happening in the next few months. We've had some situations where there was a corporate shakeup with one of our clients and some turmoil that was happening. There are some unexpected changes. The corporate team assumed that it would be isolated and that it would be impacting the people who worked directly in that corporate office.

What they found is there was a significant ripple effect of concern, worry, and uncertainty that was happening onsite that they wouldn't have been aware of had they not been getting this ongoing feedback. They were able to jump in and say, “Here's what's happening. Here's what impacts or doesn't impact you.” They were able to reassure everyone and not have this big panic about something that they didn't need to be worried about. It's important to be getting those clues all along of how are things going, what's impacting them, and what's not impacting them. It could be so valuable.

It also goes to real-time information. We live like our lives are inside a device, day in and day out. Whether we want it or not, it's not about liking or disliking it. It's a reality. We're connected. This is an extension of us. If we live our lives like that, why should we believe that certain parts of our life had to be static? Things have to be the way we like them to be.

For example, back in our day, we used to hire technicians and qualified technicians for $15 to $16 an hour. That was the start rate. That's history right now because, in reality, you're not finding employees for that much anymore. Things have changed so drastically. That goes and applies to our entire lives, especially in our industry. We're affected as well. I'm going to start with you, Kara. The next topic that I want to touch on is onboarding and its impact on employee engagement. Do you have some recent data that you would like to share with our readers and if you don't mind starting with that?

We love this topic. Jen and I have been focused on how well we are doing as an industry and welcoming new team members through that onboarding process. It's an area where there's a lot of opportunity for us to get better. That's what we've been diving into and trying to get very specific feedback from onsite team members, in particular, to see how it's going, what's working well, and where the opportunities are for improvement.

One of the things that I like in onboarding too is it's all about making a good first impression. We're good at that in terms of our leasing activity. It's something that we focus on. We care about curb appeal, decor in the office, and how we greet customers when they walk in. Making a good first impression is a skill that we have. I encourage folks to think about translating that skill over to how they welcome new employees to the organization. That can be a helpful comparison for folks, at least, I hope it can be, and turn a light bulb on as to, “We know how to do this.” Let's reconsider those new employees and think about them as customers because they are.

First off, I have to nod to Jen here and acknowledge that she's the one who dives in and digs through all of the data that comes in from our clients. She's the spreadsheet nerd over here. Thank you, Jen, for doing all of that research. A couple of things that we highlighted in a webinar that we did over at Swift Bunny was a look at the first days of employment, specifically day one. How is day one going for you when you come into the community where you work at?

For the most part, employees are saying that day one is pretty well-organized. We have an 80% agreement. Eighty percent of employees say, “First day of work was pretty well-organized.” We have 76% who say a well-organized training plan was provided. Opportunity for improvement there, but it's not terrible in my mind. It gets interesting to dig through how the different employee groups responded to that.

In an organization, for example, onsite management, there's a lot lower agreement there. Thirty-four percent of onsite management is not very well-organized. That makes sense to me because the manager is probably the one who's being required to do that organization for onboarding. When a manager is coming into a vacant seat, there may be isn't as much organization or anybody else filling that spot.

There's one that we wanted to shine a light on here. Jen, please chime in because you're passionate about this one too. We ask this question in a survey that we send out to employees on day five of their employment. We ask for their level of agreement with this statement, “My supervisor provided a clear explanation of my duties and job expectations.” Do they know what they're getting into?

Here's where it gets interesting. On day five, we have a very high level of agreement with that statement. We've got 87% of employees saying, “My supervisor did a good job of explaining what my responsibilities are.” Flash forward 3 months at the 90-day mark, we check in with these employees who are no longer the greenest of the green, but they're still new to the organization.

We check in and say, “How about now how are we feeling about the clear explanation of your duties and job expectations?” The level of agreement dropped by eight points. We now have folks saying, “I am less clear about what my responsibilities are around here, 90 days in,” that's counterintuitive. Wouldn't you think that they'd have a better or greater understanding of what it is they're supposed to be contributing to the workplace? It's interesting.

That is fascinating to me. We've talked about it so much between the two of us. Within our industry, one of the greatest challenges that we see is that people are thrown into the frying pan on day one, maybe even week one and it goes all right. They have what they need to have and some good interactions, but then they're left on their own. One of the biggest things that we see has to do with being given time to complete training during work hours. That's only 66% or 2 out of 3 employees are saying, “Yes, I'm given time to complete training during work hours.”

If I'm coming into an office, a team, or a department, and the first couple days, they're saying, “You're responsible for X, Y, and Z.” “Great. That sounds good.” As we go on and people are saying, “Can you jump in here? Can you do that?” No one told me how to do that. No one has told me what outcome I'm supposed to be aiming for. I haven't gotten any training to understand how to work the systems or log into something. I start to feel incompetent.

That's where it can be very dangerous. I can only hang around and handle feeling incompetent for so long. At some point, I'm going to start saying, “This isn't what I thought I was signing up for. I'm out of here.” That's one of the contributing reasons that we're seeing such extremely high turnover within the first 90 days of employment in our industry.

One of the particularly high-risk positions with regard to everything we talked about is onsite maintenance. They think they're signing up for one thing and then, lo and behold 90 days in, they're like, “This is a totally different ballgame. This is not what I thought this was going to be.

I'm so glad that you brought this up, Kara. To my knowledge, that's the norm with maintenance. They're coming in on the first day and say, “Welcome. Let's do your paperwork,” and then, “Have you done the paperwork? Have you finished the paperwork by the way? Can you finish it? We need you to run some work orders.” They drop the stack of work orders. “If you could finish maybe 30 by the end of the day, that would be great because we're so hot far behind.” It's not just this. It's the fact that they weren't made aware prior.

During the interview process, just say, “Property manager and service manager are the same. We're in a difficult situation. We're short-staffed. We’ll budget this for three techs. We only run with one. We've been running like this for six months. We're 1,000 work orders behind or 100.” Whatever the situation is, help your candidates make an educated decision. Don't keep them in a dark and try to oversell a situation. Those numbers are affected by situations like this especially on the maintenance side because maintenance is the shortest of all when it comes to personnel and the hardest to get people in.

There's a desperation that factors in right there. We're desperate to get anybody because we need people because of this stack of work orders. The pile grows larger. They seem to believe that withholding information upfront is going to make them sign up. They wouldn't figure it out in 1 week or 2 or 1 day or 2 for that matter. Jen, do you find this type of feedback from maintenance personnel after onboarding? Is this common? How common is it?

We do see some of this type of feedback, but we see this feedback from all of the different categories, not only maintenance. We've been so short-staffed as an industry that we are trying to fill positions and people are getting thrown into the frying pan. We heard one story about a leasing agent. It was their first time working onsite. They walk in and someone hands them a master key and a map and said, “Start leasing,” and they left.

This person who's never been a leasing agent, has never given a tour, doesn't know the software, doesn't know where the leasing agreements or even applications are suddenly manning an office alone. Those are the types of things that have happened, can happen, and do happen, but I do feel that we're seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

I was talking with some of our clients and they feel like they're having a little more breathing room. Not a lot, but a little more breathing room because of some of the layoffs that are happening throughout the country right now. More people are valuing job opportunities. They're having more of a talent pool than they've had for a couple of years now. It doesn't solve everything and it also doesn't solve the onboarding situation of being able to onboard well, but we're finally starting to see the opportunity to have more people so that we're not just taking any warm body to fill any open position.

We can be a little more thoughtful and have a little clearer conversation upfront. We're not always functioning at level ten desperation. Now, it's more like, “We need someone. Let's have a thorough conversation.” It's still a problem, but I don't think it's only isolated to maintenance. We're seeing it across the board in every position.

The next point that I wanted to discuss is regarding onboarding as well. Kara, do any of your clients do onboarding for onsite personnel offsite? In other words, if you're at Pine Creek Apartments and your first day is now and don't show up. You either go to the corporate to assist property, onboard with a senior manager, someone with a mentor, or someone that's already been with a company for a while. They know the ins and outs and could give you some very good insights into how the company function and also, walks you through the first-day process, paperwork, and all of that, which is pretty stressful.

We don't have specific data or metrics on exactly how companies are executing their onboarding. I've heard of organizations doing exactly as you described. Multifamily companies come in all shapes and sizes. The company's ability to do that onboarding at a sister property, for example, that's dependent on whether they have another asset across town. That's going to work for some, but not all. That's a brilliant strategy if you have the means to be able to do that.

It also requires some discipline so that you allow time for the new hire to be properly introduced and to train elsewhere. What I mean by discipline is, there's desperation to get that person in their exact seat immediately so they can start contributing. You have to be disciplined enough to say, “I know you have urgent needs and a stack of work orders that's 100 or 1,000 high, but this person is not going to be a valuable contributor until and unless we get them trained up to speed.” You've got to have the space, and the manpower for the training, and then you also have to have that willpower to do it right.

I was talking with one client the other day and they do a good job of matching up every new employee with a mentor within the company. It's someone who's in that same role, even if they're not in the same town, but someone who can be their lifeline. If they're in the middle of trying to figure out something and they have no clue either how to log in or how to do the next step, they can pick up the phone and call that person.

They've already been introduced. They already have established some rapport. They can feel comfortable asking a question and not feeling ridiculous. They could say, “How do I find this thing?” and having a trusted and encouraging voice that's like, “Look here,” has been helpful. The key to the success of one particular client has worked well, especially because they tend to be more spread out.

That's a brilliant strategy. As a follow-up question on what you said, do they track the efficiency when they're having mentors or people? Are they stating that their retention rates are improving? Do they see an improvement in that from doing this piece?

At that particular example, I would have to go back and look, but what I do know about that is that certain scores are some of their highest strengths. For example, we have the statement, “What I'm expected to do in my role,” and the numbers in that particular question are significantly higher than what I see with other companies. We might take it for granted, “I hope you're supposed to do in your role,” and the other one that they score high in is, “I know who to go to for help.” That's another one that shows up in their top five.

We can take those things for granted, but so often, we are in this mindset of, “Fake it until we make it.” People are afraid to ask questions and look foolish. When you create an environment where not only is it okay to ask questions, but we're going to assign you a person to ask questions to, it helps. If we went back and dove in, my gut sense would be the retention rate is higher, especially in the first 90 days because people don't feel like they're floating in the ocean. They are tethered to someone and they can see that there's a support system in place.

What I love about that too is that person they are tethered to is not their supervisor. They don't have to worry about looking dumb or revealing their ignorance to somebody who might think less of them for that. It doesn't jeopardize their standing in the organization because they can simply reach out to a peer. It feels like a safe way for them to get the help that they need.

This was part of the reason why I was asking, “Are they doing it offsite?” If you do it offsite, chances are you going to do it with someone that you're not going to be working with on a daily basis. That builds a comfort zone right there because you feel like, “I can pose a question to this person. They're not going to turn around and tell my boss that I asked a stupid question.” It releases some of that tension. They are trying to prove themselves or having to look left and right, “Am I doing this right? Am I saying the right things to these people that I never met in my life?”

This happened to me many years ago. It was my first manager job. I asked a lot of questions to my community manager. After probably 10 or 15 questions, she took the company's SOP manual. It was thick with no exaggeration and she put it in my lap. She said, “This would be a very helpful tool for you to find a lot of answers in it.” Honestly, she meant well, but there were so many questions that I had that she couldn't answer.

The company at the time didn't have a structure for maintenance. They weren't maybe large enough to afford to have a director in that area. Managers didn't know so many specifics about policies and procedures when it came to maintenance. I took that as an opportunity and took the manual. They left it with me. I still have that manual at home. This was 2007, so this is many years ago.

There are a lot of great things that I learned by reading it. I took the time and read it. It paid off because several months later, they promoted me to the regional service director position. That worked out well, but it's happening out there and it's hard. Swift Bunny is a feedback business. Is it safe to say that?

Absolutely.

Jen, you do provide a lot of action feedback. In other words, companies could build an action plan based on the feedback that you're providing. It's very accurate and bold. What is the importance of the feedback that you're providing, being looked at, and being used to improve the work environment? How important is that piece?

It's so critical. It's the piece. Why ask a question if you are not going to look at or listen to the answer? It's like having a conversation where I ask you, “Adrian, how are you doing?” You say, “I'm doing great. How are you?” and I just walk away. You're going to be left going, “What was that?” It's the same thing with our employees. If we ask them how are things going and they say, “This is going well, but this is not going very well.” It is crickets. I come back a couple of months later and I'm like, “How are things going now?” Why bother? It's not worth their time.

If you ask for feedback and I give it to you, I now learned that you're not going to do anything about it. I don't know if you've read it and you're ignoring it completely or you can't do anything about it. As I don't know the answer to any of those scenarios, I'm not going to bother. This is what I tell all of our clients after our very first baseline. They've done their very first survey with all their employees. We've got the results.

I go through the executive review with them and I say, “Now, the number one thing is having a meeting all company-wide meeting and letting them know we heard you. Here's what you told us is going well. Here are some things that we know are important to you. Here are 1 or 2 things that we're going to be focusing on based on what you told us.”

By doing that one thing, we’re letting them know, “We heard you. In fact, here's the good and the bad,” the engagement of companies will go up a couple of points just by having that meeting. People know that they've been heard and they feel like you're paying attention. They'll be watching to see if the action occurs, but there are some companies that are simply doing an employee feedback program to check a box and say, “We ask our employees how they're doing,” but you can see very clearly and quickly which companies are simply checking a box.

You'll see very quickly that response rates will fall off a cliff because their employees are like, “That was a waste of time.” For companies that are constantly saying, “We heard you. Here's what we heard, and here's what we're doing,” you'll see those response rates not only maintained but increase because the employees are like, “This is worth it. They're paying attention,” and they like being a part of the conversation, and impacting and influencing company decisions that are going forward.

You said something that's extremely important. It's the need to be heard. Kara, from the feedback that you're getting, and the questions that you're asking, how important is this piece? How important is it for employees to hear that their voices are being heard? Not necessarily that, “Everything we're going to say out there is going to change the way we want it,” but we are being heard. How important is that? Maybe you feel comfortable sharing some great and practical examples from your clients where employees feel like they're being heard and things are improving because of that?

It's the backbone of a good work environment where communication flows in both directions. Communication challenges are always a hot button in all the feedback that we receive from all employee groups. Challenges with being listened to, having a voice, being able to offer suggestions for improvements, and the company taking them seriously or listening to them at all. The flip side of that communication challenge is we hear a lot about team members saying, “I don't know what's going on. Nobody tells me anything.”

Good communication is a big umbrella. There's a lot of opportunity there to figure out what's working well and not working so well and make improvements. Communication risks come up as one of the top four risks that Jen and I have identified that lead to employee attrition. It's worth the emphasis for all supervisors to figure out how to improve communication within their workspace.

One of the things that I want to stress is this. When we work with our clients and they get feedback from their employees, one of the things that we're after is to try to figure out the difference between what supervisors think their employees think, and what employees think. There can be a wide gap. Until companies are utilizing a feedback program, supervisors are operating on a lot of assumptions about what they think they know about their team members. That's a dangerous space.

What they think they know and how employees feel can be very different. It's not always negative. Sometimes we find out that employees are happy about something that leaders thought needed to change or fix. It's not always negative information that they get from the team members. Here's an example that I wanted to share that I hope will illustrate that point. We love to work with apartment dynamics. The very first client to roll out our employee feedback program and the leaders there led by Mary Gwen are open to embracing learning from the input from their team members.

The example I wanted to share with you is during the pandemic, they took to doing frequent all-hands-on-deck meetings, which I believe were conducted via Zoom, Teams, or something and cameras are on. All employees meet with leadership. It was a very frequent huddle. The pace was weekly and everybody was getting together. There was so much information to share with policies and procedures changing by the hour, thanks to everything that we were learning and dealing with during the pandemic.

At some point, the world calmed down and things start started to normalize. The leadership started to think, “Maybe we don't need to have these meetings so frequently. We can give people some time back in their schedule,” but rather than making the change, they put it out to the group first to say, “Here's what we're thinking. We assume you guys all would prefer to get back to business as usual and get a little bit of time back in your day, so we're going to go ahead and scale back these meetings. Everybody good with that?”

The team spoke up and said, “No, that's our very favorite thing. Don't get rid of those meetings. We love those meetings. We love having time with the company's leadership.” That was such a surprise to the leaders, but they totally did what the group suggested and maintained those meetings because they were so productive. You got to check your assumptions. You think you know what the team wants, but you may not know. You've got to get input from the associates who are doing the work.

I'd love to share another example. They're so good, do tune in, and their people do know that their leaders are tuning in. Another company, Paragon, is also one of the very first companies that rolled out with us. They were dealing with everyone. They have a super high-maintenance turnover. They're in the Great Lakes area in Michigan. Snow is a big problem in the winter and that's where they would see the highest turnover in January and February.

People would get burned out by the snow situation. They knew from the survey from the maintenance team that they did not have the tools and resources they felt they needed. They did a focus group and said, “What would be helpful?” One of the things they identified was how we deal with snow removal. There was so much overtime because of snow removal. They were getting so far behind with work orders.

The president said, “What's a better way to do this? How do we deal with snow removal?” What they found was they wanted more ability to make decisions about it. If they could hire out some snow removal, whether it was for the parking lots or walkways, or maybe it was shoveling and salting. They asked for and received the autonomy to make the decision for each property of what level of snow removal assistance they needed.

The president was cautiously optimistic but a little worried about how this was going to go. What he assumed was that everyone would have full snow removal all the time. What he found was that each individual property was thoughtful about what they wanted to outsource. They looked at their budgets and manpower and made decisions accordingly. Their turnover for maintenance dropped dramatically. Not just a little, a lot down to something like 18% where it had been well over 50%.



One of the biggest takeaways for him and a lot of companies are learning this is the wisdom of the team. Sometimes they don't realize what amazing wisdom and experience comes from our onsite team members who've been there and done that at a variety of different places. If they would stop and listen, some great practical ideas can come to fruition and they did experience that.

I love you shared those magnificent examples. There are two things that come to mind. One is that treat people like they make a difference and they will make a difference. Secondly, when you're in a leadership position, you're not only a leadership position expected to make all the decisions for everybody. Ask the experts. The best experts that you have in your organization are going to be the site teams because they're there every day.

If you are corporate, you are not there every day. I'm sorry. You could be a brilliant person, but if you're not doing this on a daily basis, day in and day out, whatever the site team does or whatever task, chances are you're not going to be more qualified than that person or performer on site to give actionable but good feedback and provide solutions too. It is not just that, “We got to describe a problem.” If people feel like they're being appreciated and heard, they come up with solutions too. They'll find the solutions for you. All you have to do is ask.

That's exactly right. A lot of leaders oftentimes think that the ideas that they get from onsite team members will be pie in the sky and expensive. I would say 99% of the time the best ideas or the most practical ideas come exactly from what you're saying, from onsite or the people who are dealing with it every single day.

This reminds me of a previous experience of mine where the leadership of one of the companies I worked for at the time had service managers' meetings and said, “Make sure that you're not open in those two questions for too long. Leave it at the very end for two minutes because this is going to turn into a complaining session.” I said, “I'm not doing that. If I'm asked along the way, I'm going to stop and ask questions for feedback.”

In the end, if they have 30 minutes to ask questions, I'll spend 30 minutes listening to them. What's the whole point of having meetings just to talk to people? This is not doing any type of good. I'm telling them what they're not doing right and how the thing should be. If it's not a two-way street, forget about it. Don't ever think that you're going to make things better.

There's not even a point in having meetings. It's better not to have any meetings than to have a meeting and you are the only one talking to your people. Instead, make it conversational and learn from it. We learn so much by listening to understand and not by listening to respond. Whilst the other person is talking, I'm building my answer in my mind because I had to provide an immediate answer. Take five seconds, process, and try to understand what the other person is saying versus then I got my answer ready for it. That's not the whole point.

The next topic that I want to touch on is something that Kara and I discussed in the very first episode. This time I'm going to ask you, Jen. Let's talk a little bit about labor shortages and what caused this significant tremendous labor shortage that we're dealing with as an industry. What possible solutions or practical advice do we have out there to help the management of the companies?

Every industry is experiencing a labor shortage and it has been bad and very disruptive. As I said, we're starting to see a little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, but there are a few things that have factored in. When we look at the shutdown with COVID, almost everyone had to go remote. We had a skeleton crew on site that was required to be there and still do some emergency service requests, and things like that. The vast majority of team members had or were forced to work remotely, or at least work in an isolated situation.

What a lot of people realized is some people, depending on whether they were a caregiver of some kind for children or for aging parents, realized the necessity of having flexibility. A lot of people realized, “I like this remote thing. I'd like to do more of that.” Some people realized, “I can get paid a lot more doing something less restrictive somewhere else in a different industry.”

We were dealing with a whole lot of different types of things. As we're going back to a business that's being conducted in a more familiar manner, it's more similar to what we saw pre-pandemic. There are a lot of companies that wanted to go back to the way it was without looking at the lessons learned, the benefit, the technologies that were put into place, the centralization that they were able to accomplish, and the flexibility that we were able to grant our teams. Some people are ignoring all those lessons learned completely.

What we have the opportunity to do as an industry and company by company is look at what lessons we learned internally. How were we able to staff and manage our communities by providing flexibility? We had to deal with things like childcare. When kids were having to learn on Zoom, someone had to be hanging out with the kids. There was nowhere for them to go.

Our teams made it work. They were able to support each other and stagger things enough to make it all work. That's what people are looking for. It's not necessarily that everyone wants to work remotely, but people are asking for a little more flexibility and grace so that they can manage their personal lives a little more effectively. They don't want to shirk the work, but they do want some flexibility.

There are some companies that are looking at getting rid of on-call and changing their work hours so that their maintenance team members start later in the day and end later in the day because they found that the majority of their emergency work orders happened around 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM. That's not so difficult to make that shift. There are a lot of maintenance people who would be like, “I'm all about that. I would rather start my day later and end later so that I'm not having to go home with an on-call phone as frequently,” for example, or people have more flexibility, “Do we need to start at 8:00 AM? Can we start a little bit later? Can we have some flex schedules? Can we work four ten-hour days?”

There are a lot of different things that we can do to make our industry more attractive and flexible and still get all of the work done because we did it before. We did it during COVID. Let's take those lessons and apply them because then everybody wins. Our employees win. Our companies win by having less turnover and greater productivity. Our residents win because they're dealing with happier employees and more consistent employees. There are a lot of things that we can do that will positively impact our ability to attract and retain employees.

I couldn't say it better. Let's do things for the win. Let's all win. It is not a win-lose situation. If I'm winning, you're losing. We could all win from this. That's an amazing thing and opportunity that I see in front of us as an industry. I like to point out the things that must be improved that we need to improve on. I do that all the time, but I always like to bring solutions too. “This is something that we could do.” I don't want people to think that this is a negative thing. I'm bringing down the industry.

Those are things that we need to speak up about. If we don't start the conversation, how are those things going to become better all of the sudden? We need to discuss and come up with solutions. There were a lot of solutions and great stories that you both share with us right here with our readers. I'd love to have you back here to do another episode soon if you accept my invitation.

We have a lot more to talk about, Adrian. We're going to have to do this at least 2 or 3 more times.

We could make a regular thing. Maybe once a quarter, we touch base and have a conversation because things change so fast. Honestly, I'm not the type of host who goes through a list of 10 or 15 topics and rushes through them. I want to provide some meaningful content. The way I can provide this is to let my guest talk and let them share their wisdom. There's been a lot of great wisdom out here. I'm very grateful for both of you coming to the show. In closing, is there something that you wish you would've said you didn't have the opportunity to say for this episode? Kara, I want to start with you.

My closing remark would be like Jen, I do see some glimmers of hope in the labor situation. However, 2023 is going to continue to be a tough slog. I do think it's going to continue to challenge us in rental housing. Filling those seats is going to be very challenging. Therefore, it makes all the sense in the world to do everything that you can to prevent your employees from leaving in the first place. The best recruitment strategy is to keep your people in place. That's where the focus should be for the new year. You can worry a little bit less about recruitment, which is going to continue to be impossibly hard and focus on employee retention.

I have to completely agree with Kara. The other thing I would say and we touched on it barely is the importance of leadership and leadership being the voice of what the vision is. Employees want to hear from leadership. They want to see them set the tone. That sets the tone for everything, from how we speak to each other, to the positive attitude that we bring to our work, to providing time for training and making that a priority.

For those things, you can't just assume that HR is going to be managing and handling it. They will, but what they need is the support, the encouragement, and the championing of executive leadership saying, “These are the things that are important to us as an organization and the things that are important to me,” and that sets the table nicely for all of these new employees and our existing employees that they want to do good work. We have to make it possible and set it up for them.

I want to make leadership the first topic of our next conversation. I hope to get you back here. Not in a year, not in a few months, but maybe sooner than that, if your schedules will allow and you would like to come back because there's so much more to cover. In closing, I want to thank you both so much. I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and wisdom with me and the readers. I hope to see you back here soon.

Thank you so much, Adrian. It's such a pleasure. We'd love to be back.

Pick the date. We will be there. Thank you so much for having us.

I'll take you up on it. You'll hear from me as soon as we finish this conversation. Everybody, thank you very much for reading. I hope to see you back here. Have a great day.

Important Links

• Kara Rice – LinkedIn
• Jen Piccotti – LinkedIn
• Kara Rice – Past Episode
• Swift Bunny