NEW ORLEANS – If your property is dysfunctional, issues between maintenance and the office are often to blame. Even healthy apartment communities can have problems.

“There's always that office-maintenance divide,” Monica Garcia, senior vice president of operations at Dayrise Residential, said at the National Apartment Association’s Apartmentalize conference in New Orleans on June 18.

Usually, the culprit is miscommunication or a lack of information of what the other side does.

“The maintenance team is thinking, 'Obviously, they [the office staff] are just sitting there in the AC and just working on the computer, doing whatever,’” Garcia said. “And then the office is thinking, ‘Why is it taking so long to do this work order?’”

The good news is that the gap between the office and the maintenance shop isn’t driven by apathy. “It's actually that they care so much, and that's putting so much pressure on them,” Garcia said.

Instead, Roger Remblake, vice president of facility management at Waterton, thinks timing and efficiency are to blame for the issues with service teams, specifically the number of calls they get from the office as they’re trying to complete a job.

“Someone that's a mechanic that’s working on something, what they want to do is they want to get in there, they want to finish, they want to get it done and they want to get out,” Remblake said at Apartmentalize. “But when their phone or their radio or the text messages keep coming in, we all know it could take a 15-or-20-minute job into an hour, an hour and a half or two hours.”

To bridge the gap between maintenance and the office, communication and empathy are important, according to Apartmentlize panelists. Without that, it will be even harder to placate ever-demanding renters.

“The resident doesn't care what's going on,” Garcia said. “They don't care that you have five ACs out that morning.”

Here are three ways to get the two groups operating as one.

Communicate daily

To solve timing issues, Remblake says properties need to start with maintenance and office staffers sitting and talking. But with each handling a “boatload of work,” that’s hard, he said.

Heather Sanchez, a senior trainer at Chadwell Supply, said the key to communication is giving someone information in the way they need to receive it and learning whether they’re a data or visual person. “What type of person [are they]?” she said. “And how [do they] need to hear it?”

Holding a team meeting first thing in the morning can be one way to get the office and maintenance staff on the same page. 

For “15 or 20 minutes, everybody from the site needs to be there,” Remblake said. “They all need to hear the same thing — who's moving in, who's moving out, what vendors are coming in, what's going on at the site and what was left over from yesterday that needs to happen today.” 

Switch roles

But it's also important to know when to stop communicating. If an angry resident calls the office demanding to know the status of a project at their apartment, the staff member must resist the temptation to ask maintenance for an update when they’re in the middle of another job, according to Nichole Curl, director of Chadwell University at Chadwell Supply. 

“You’ve got to put the phone down,” Curl said. “You’ve got to stop interrupting them.”

Sometimes it helps to walk in someone else’s shoes. Remblake said a program in which office and maintenance staff switch roles for a day can be extremely helpful.

The process can also give office staff an understanding of the demands maintenance faces. At the same time, service teams can better understand the pressures their teammates face from residents, regional managers and owners, among others.

“We've even taken service managers and chief engineers and said: ‘Put out a nice pair of dress pants and a nice polo shirt, you're going to sit next to the community manager for four hours,’” Remblake said. “You're going to have a different renewed respect for what the individual is doing.”

Document carefully

While constant interruptions aren’t productive, providing detailed, specific instructions in the work order system about the nature of the repair and what needs to be fixed is necessary. 

“We want to be factual about what's there, and also [provide] as much information [as possible] to guide the maintenance team,” Sanchez said. “So when they're going in there, they're not going blind as to what's going on.”

Maintenance also needs to be careful and specific when it comes to documentation. Instead of just saying the air conditioning was fixed, team members need to mark what part of the system was replaced. That detail helps in potential litigation and with follow-up calls from angry residents.

“By not having that detail in the documentation of work, the office is not able to support you in the field,” Curl said.

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