Remote Working For HOAs: 4 Tools to Simplify Operations

As we all enter the second month of Work from Home (WFH), community managers are hard at work helping their staff successfully transition to completely digital modes of communication to ensure efficient operations. The key to successfully operating a company that is centered on community relationships is regularly communicating with your residents, board members, and staff members. Community managers can help their staff work remotely successfully and with confidence when they have reliable tools to connect with one another. Cloud-based software can help managers and their staff alike keep operations moving smoothly remotely through any device and location. In this article, we discuss four tools in Pilera to help you to continue to enhance and measure operational efficiency while you WFH.

Communication

In a time of uncertainty, it is essential to communicate with residents on a regular basis on any changes/updates to management company’s operative policies or hours, upcoming remote meetings or activities, community sanitization measures, any city mandates, or post-COVID 19/recovery plans. This will help ensure that your residents are thoroughly aware of any new changes in the community in the city. To effectively facilitate these communications, managers can send a text, email, or phone blast to the community or send one-off messages to residents. They can segment the communication by location or by the user to ensure the relevancy of their communications. In the event of an emergency, managers can send a message via the Reverse 911 system. Doing so will ignore the communication preference and send an automatic text and phone call to the resident. However, you’ll not want to stop at just sending out messages. Measuring the effectiveness of your messages is just as important. In the Message Center, managers will be able to see a live update of who has opened the email, how long a call was listened to, and who was left a voicemail. Week over week, Pilera has seen an uptick in the amount of messages managers send to residents to keep them updated.

Task Management

The most effective way to collaborate on any work for the community or within the management company is to create a task. In the task creation area, managers and board members can type in the details to ensure that nothing is lost in communication. Then, they can assign the task to one another and set a follow-up date. However, it doesn’t just end there. Managers and board members can add comments to the ongoing ticket, update the status as it progresses, and close it once completed. A history of all interactions can then be viewed on a ticket-by-ticket basis. This helps managers and board members review successful task completions as well as identify any shortcomings that need to be addressed in the process. In the dashboard, managers and board members will be reprised of open and completed tasks by category, subcategory, person, and more.

Maintenance

In lieu of calling the management office or walking-in, residents can submit requests for essential maintenance work in their unit through the resident portal. Managers can then assign the task to another manager or to a vendor for completion. Once the task has been completed, the resident can be notified of the same via email or the portal ticket. Additionally, managers can create work order tickets themselves for a particular unit or for the common areas, assign it to a vendor or manager, add in details/photos/documents, and update the status as the work order progresses.

Ticket Analytics Report

When working remotely, it’s become more important than ever to understand staff efforts and productivity without having to look in multiple places for a single source of truth. The Ticket Analytics Report provides a high-level insight into all of the work your staff performs for each community and breaks it down into created, closed, or open assigned during a specific time-frame. Here are a few ways that you can use the report:

Identify employee overload – If you notice the employee has created more tasks than closed for a certain period, you can do more research to understand why and identify a solution. Is the employee overwhelmed with tasks? Are they waiting for someone’s input? Do they need any additional resources or expertise to help navigate them through the task?
Show the work you’ve done for a community – During community meetings via web conferencing, your board members want to know about the work completed and in progress for their community. The ticket analytics report will display the tickets created, closed or open assigned per ticket type for each community. You can gather that information to share with them at the meeting.

About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management suite that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations. May we help your community achieve these success stories? Book a demo to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company.