Chances are you will participate in an office meeting today that involves coworkers from within your department or perhaps involves a greater number of people, those who work at your company either at headquarters or onsite at a community.

These meetings are intended to help you and your company solve a problem, work toward achieving a long-term project goal or simply gain fresh, up-to-date information.

Speak to apartment industry professionals about attending such meetings and many will immediately display a look of impatience, anxiety or worse. Not another meeting!

For them, often the meeting either wastes their valuable time, inconveniences them or simply creates even more work. These same disgruntled staff members, some of which estimate that they will attend as many as 10 meetings per week, admit they are powerless to stop the meeting routine that is part of their company’s culture.

The agenda plays a critical role in running a smooth meeting. Having one is important, however, sticking to it is even more critical. The meeting organizer should define expectations when the meeting starts and assign action items during the meeting or at its conclusion. If non-agenda items arise during the meeting, they should be noted and discussed at the end of the meeting, if time permits. Or, create a board to post the non-agenda items and attach names to the topics so that the group is aware of things that need to be addressed when it is convenient to do so.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the leader should ensure that the meeting participants understand their roles and responsibilities by requiring these staff members to recap the specific actions they will take to help achieve overall goals. It also is a good idea to assign a note-taker to the meeting, who afterward shares a summary of the points made and the steps discussed to reach the desired outcomes. These notes also can be shared with others in the company who would benefit from knowing the next steps that were assigned.

3 Companies Share Their Meetings Strategy

Gene B. Glick: All For One, One For All
Originally, The Gene B. Glick Company held combined meetings with stakeholders from operations, property management and marketing.

But according to Jason Whittington, Vice President, Business Solutions, The Gene B. Glick Company, it thought that it was wasting too many staff members’ time by having all of them involved for the entire meeting.

“We felt that it might be a more efficient use of the corporate staff to break the meeting into separate meetings for each group cycling the properties through each group’s meeting,” Whittington says. “But we found out that by breaking the meeting apart, there would be important communications that went on about personnel, operations, etc., that did not necessarily get relayed to all of the important parties. Things would fall through the cracks. Things such as an understanding about why certain results were happening weren’t fully understood by all. Decisions would sometimes be made that were counter-effective to solutions.”

For example, if occupancy was dropping, the marketing team might suggest that they try to drive more traffic and leads to the team to help generate leases; the revenue management team might suggest a drop in rents to help fill empty units. But in actuality, the true issue could have been that the operations team was having personnel issues in terms or an individual’s performance, or maybe the community was down one employee due to a health issue.

“Or maybe units weren’t being turned as quickly or effectively as we had hoped,” he says. “So, if a leasing office was short-handed, giving them more leads to deal with could only make matters worse. Instead of just pulling the pricing or marketing lever to help solve a problem, maybe instead it makes sense to pull the training or resource lever. By not having all involved in the call, or by not knowing the specific situations going on that resulted in a challenge, these details might not come up until days or weeks later.”

As a potential solution, Whittington says, The Gene B. Glick Company is working toward a process where it will hold its meetings every other week via the phone over approximately a four-hour time period.

The calls would be set up so that the right people at the right level of management are on the call, listening to everything that pertains to their area of expertise, but simultaneously are working on other job responsibilities while they listen, taking notes or joining in on the conversation for topics that are specific to them. As many as 30 communities might be a part of the call’s agenda, but the property manager or assistant at one community would only be required to listen in for their 10-minute segment, while regional property managers or department heads would tend to be on for larger portions or the entirety of the call. Each regional property manager would serve as the quarterback for their segment of the call to ensure that action items are created and responsibilities are understood.

- Glick owns over 20,000 apartment homes in 12 states.

 

WC Smith: Whiteboard-ing
Holli Beckman is Vice President of Marketing and Leasing Operations for WC Smith, a mid-sized owner and manager in Washington, D.C. “For my department, we have weekly standing meetings
around a whiteboard table,” Beckman says. “My entire office is basically a whiteboard.”

Her meeting format is based on the department’s goals and strategy system. “When it comes to marketing and branding, there’s only so much that can be communicated via email and meetings become
the necessary evil,” Beckman says. “It took a while to find what worked best for my team, but we settled on this basic outline.”

If the main goal is X,

• List the three indicators we are going to use to determine how close we are to reaching our goal.
• To accomplish each, make a list of five to 10 tasks that must be completed.
• Define the owner of each task and its deadline.

“This format also gives each team member complete transparency on how many tasks are on each person’s plate,” Beckman says. “Its prevents anyone from feeling like they’re the only one who is working
extra hard.”

Beckman shifts the plan when it comes to meeting with her company’s C suite.

“Instead, start with ‘The Why’ behind what we are attempting,” she says. “Then present data, numbers and the cost associated with each step outlined.”

Beckman admits that everyone on her team “has a lot on their plate. So this structure makes each member feel like their time is being valued and not eaten up with meandering, non-specific agendas.”

 

EdR: A Bunch of ‘Slackers’
Kim Cory is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at national student housing owner and developer EdR. Nine months ago, she introduced a new communications tool, Slack, to her sales and marketing team. She says the effectiveness of communication and response time between her and her 15-person team has improved ten-fold.

“We all work in various locations and usually not together,” Cory says. “Slack can be used on our desktop or mobile devices. Unlike a Facebook group, Slack allows a more exclusive team feel for communication and collaboration. It’s more casual than email. Responses between team members are quick and almost instantaneous, like with texting tools they are used to. They prefer that.”

Slack allows users to segment their conversations into groups based on projects such as a leasing promotion, renewals, a social media pitch and even team-bonding humor. It allows private, direct communication or messages sent to the entire group. Group members can share links, images, videos and documents and users can read and engage in an entire thread of communication.

Cory says Slack avoids today’s onslaught of emails when too many people are copied on too many emails that they simply cannot keep organized. Slack also has an indicator
that lets the group know the status of others in the group.

“I might be visiting a site for an in-person meeting, I might be traveling or I might be off at that time,” Cory says. “This way, others know why it’s taking me longer to respond to emails. It’s quicker and easier for us to send simple communication via Slack over email regardless of where we are. You can ping people and get quick, short responses. It serves that need that some younger employees have for instant
gratification.”

Cory says the average age of her staff is 25. She adds that EdR Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Christine Richards also uses it.

“Millennials and [the younger] Generation Z do not prefer email, especially long emails,” Cory says. “They want to communicate through apps with short snippets of information. They hear you talk about dial-in conference calls and they think, ‘That’s so 90s.’ If you want to attract a younger workforce, you have to look at tools like this.”

Today’s executive leaders should embrace this type of culture with their teams, Cory says. “They are looking for a more personal and less-structured approach to communication and training.”

Using Slack has made her staff members feel like they belong to a “special, unique club,” Cory say. “It’s a more casual form of communication. Email is so structured and formal.”

Cory says the age or experience of staff members is not a deterrent to implementing a product such as Slack.

“Look around,” she says. “People in every generation are texting, using apps, communicating through mobile and seek instant gratification. It doesn’t have to be that hard to do.”

She says since EdR has been using it, her staff has stayed on task, excited and enjoys the team collaboration. She no longer hears excuses such as, “Sorry for dropping the ball” and, “I was just so busy I forgot to respond.”

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Written and edited by Paul R. Bergeron III, NAA Director of Publications, with contributions from the NAA Communications Advisory Board