Apartment communities have notoriously high employee turnover rates, and the past few years have made hanging on to leasing and service professionals especially challenging. There are many reasons why staff turnover is costly to a rental housing organization. But is resident satisfaction one of them? You bet.

Employee turnover and resident turnover are closely connected. Residents deeply dislike it when employee turnover occurs in their apartment community team. Why do they care so much? Because turnover on the apartment community team impacts their living experience in three significant ways.

Fully staffed teams deliver prompt and efficient service

When an apartment community experiences employee turnover, especially if a position remains empty for an extended period, the focus of the remaining staff and supervisors shifts from delivering excellent service to "what fire do we have to put out first?" They don't have the luxury of concentrating on resident experience or even attending to needs that are less-than-urgent, such as returning residents' phone calls. Resident service and satisfaction suffer.

While in the early days of the pandemic the world rallied our patience for slow service and our support for service providers, those days have long passed. In today's environment, residents are increasingly impatient with service delays or shortcomings and will judge a community team harshly for failing to deliver.

Experience is knowledge that fast-tracks resident satisfaction

The institutional knowledge that walks out the door when a team member departs is significant. Even if a community can recruit a highly experienced new hire, that individual won't have knowledge about the specific property they are working at or its resident customers. While a long-serving Maintenance Supervisor may know which areas of the parking lot are prone to developing black ice in the winter, which apartments have recurring window leaks when the rain comes down hard, and which resident always struggles with getting the heat turned on for the first time each season, a newcomer does not. They simply don't yet have the experience that will quickly lead to good service outcomes for residents. This takes time to develop, and in the meantime, resident satisfaction and service suffer.

Relationships matter

In many businesses, customers like working with familiar faces. It's both more enjoyable and more efficient to interact with someone you've worked with in the past. This is especially true in our business because a person's home is so much more personal to them than their daily take-out coffee, for example. Residents prefer to work with someone they know in the leasing office, and they hate it when they must start over with new people on the team who don't know them and their history. This is even more true on the service side, as residents care deeply about who they let into their home to perform maintenance service. They crave consistency, and they find it uncomfortable and unpleasant when the people they had a relationship with are no longer there. They may even refuse to let someone new into their home. A lack of familiar faces and established relationships means resident satisfaction and service will undoubtedly suffer.

If your community's goals include resident retention, a focus on employee retention can get you there. That's why, in my opinion, your employees are your most important customers. When you create a workplace culture where team members feel supported and satisfied, they'll stick around. When your team is stable and high performing, your residents are more likely to stick around, also.

What do you think? I'd love to hear about your experiences and your opinion in the comments.