How to manage HOA Board Member expectations.

4 Ways to Meet HOA Board Member Expectations

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Are board members truly satisfied with the level of service provided by your HOA management company?

Over the past few years, the expectations of board members have changed drastically. As an HOA management company, the opinion and expectations of the board members should be of high importance to you.

In this article, you’ll learn about 4 ways management companies can meet and even exceed board member expectations.

1) Increase visibility

An important goal of board members is to ensure that community operations run smoothly and that decisions taken are in the collective members’ best interests.

An HOA or Condo association will often hire a management company to help them to run the community’s operations and handle finances, maintenance, violations, complaints, and more. Board members want to gain visibility into the community’s operations and finances. They also want to know the type of issues residents are experiencing and how the management company is handling these interactions.

Managers can meet board member expectations by improving visibility, regularly communicating with board members, and providing them with status updates. One of the most useful ways to give your board members visibility is by creating a monthly Board Packet. Board packets can include financial statements, reports on in-progress and completed work orders, resident support requests, violations, and any other tasks that managers are working on.

Pilera’s HOA software empowers managers to increase visibility and communication with the board through real-time analytics. The Ticket Analytics Report gives insight into the open, closed, and in-progress tickets for work orders, ACRs, rule violations, support, and tasks. With the help of these real-time reports, managers can directly communicate the value of their services to the board member and thereby improve board member satisfaction.

2) Fast response time

In the digital age, customers expect a fast response time from the companies they do business with, and it’s no different for HOA and condo communities. It’s important to establish a method of communication with your board members and residents and the frequency with which you will communicate with them. When they reach out to you, it’s important to set expectations on when they will get a response. Here are a few ways to manage expectations and improve your response times:

  • Inform your board members of when they can expect a response from you. Is it within 24 hours or 48 hours? Clearly state this on your website or email responses.
  • Maintain a singular place for board members and residents to submit requests, whether that is through email, a form on your website, or an online portal.
  • Encourage self-service in your community by keeping your website or online portal fresh with the latest community information, documents, events, and more.

3) Reduce the risk of liability

Since board members volunteer their time to run the association, they may not have the expertise to handle rules and regulations that impact the community. Therefore, they often look up to an HOA management company to guide them through legal questions or challenges. Managers need to be well-versed in community association law and actions that a community needs to take to comply.

Also, by maintaining information on a technology platform, you can help board members reduce the risk of a community’s liability. Here’s how:

  • Maintain all interactions and communications within the community. This can be done effortlessly through an HOA software such as Pilera’s.
  • Keep a history of all open and closed tickets for work orders, ACRs, rule violations, support, and tasks.
  • Pilera’s document library has board-specific folders so they can access important rules & regulations.
  • Managing repair work is a major task undertaken by management companies. HOA associations are required to acquire a minimum of 3 vendor bids for repair and maintenance work. Managers can help associations compare bids and secure the best vendor.
  • With Pilera’s vendor management, you can easily store vendor information and receive automated COI reminders, thereby reducing the community’s liability.

4) Manage daily operations efficiently

Board members rely heavily upon HOA management companies to run their associations and manage their operations. An HOA management company acts primarily as an advisor of the HOA board and serves as its helping hand. As an HOA manager, you have to handle a variety of tasks such as maintenance, resident requests, violations, architectural change approvals, vendor bids, and more. With so many tasks to manage, time management and efficiency are critical. Creating more efficiency enables you to generate better outcomes for the community as well as save the community money. Here are some ways in which you can improve team efficiency:

  • Streamline processes – You should have a well-documented process of how your team handles different tasks from start to finish and how to handle any problems that arise.
  • Improve communication with staff and board members – It’s important to keep your board members informed of tasks and projects that you are working on for them. With a collaborative HOA platform such as Pilera’s, you can update the status of any work, communicate with board members and staff, and automatically maintain a history of each task.
  • Invest in technology to automate tasks – With the right technology, you can manage a variety of tasks, communicate with board members and residents, and monitor your workflow.

Conclusion

By working with your board member clients, you can create more self-sufficient communities and improve operations together. When you invest in automated technology, you can improve transparency with the Board, respond faster, reduce any potential risks or liability, and create more efficiency.