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description has remained fixed: “Communication is our business,” says Paul W. Carroccio, CMCA, AMS, operations manager for TPW Management Company, a Vermontbased company managing communities in Vermont, New Hampshire and the Delaware beach area. Communication is as important for managers today as it was 25 years ago. What has changed, however — for better and worse — is the technology available to them. Cell phones, smart phones, e-mail, search engines and interactive Internet sites have created amazing efficiencies and sometimes unreasonable expectations — a classic double-edged sword. “E-mail allows us to be more connected to the communities we serve, which is nice,” McNabb says. But constant communication can take a toll on managers who are expected to be constantly accessible. Owners and board members accustomed to instant Google searches expect equally rapid responses to their e-mails. “If you haven’t responded within an hour,” McNabb says, “they wonder why.” “When I first started in this business 12 years ago,” Alexis recalls, “you’d go to a board meeting with the information package, go through all the tasks and get a new set of tasks to complete before the next meeting. You didn’t get a dozen e-mail messages the next day asking for updates on the new tasks and adding 10 more tasks to your list.” “It is a real problem for us,” Carroccio agrees. On the one hand, a reputation for responsiveness is a competitive advantage. Boards seeking to replace a management company often cite as their primary complaint, its failure to respond to board questions and owner concerns. Managers known for their responsiveness tend to get high marks from their clients. “But if you get a reputation for being available 24/7, there’s a snowball effect,” Carroccio observes. “The next client hears about it, and that becomes an expectation the company

has to meet. As a result: “We continue to burn out employees.”

Managing Expectations
The solution, Carroccio and other industry executives suggest, is to manage client expectations — to define what it is reasonable for them to expect. “We follow up immediately,” Carroccio says, by acknowledging receipt of voice- or e-mails, and then indicating when the question will be answered, the information provided or the concern addressed. “It only takes a second to say ‘we’ll get back to you,’ Carroccio says, “but you’ve bought yourself 48 hours or more” before action is required, while still providing the quick response the client expected. Follow-through is essential, however, Alexis notes. “Once you set the expectation, you have to meet it. If you say you’ll have an answer in a week, you have to fulfill that obligation.” Management companies must set clear and reasonable expectations for their staff, as well as for their clients, industry executives agree. Thayer says he regularly responds to e-mail “at odd hours — 5:00 in the morning, midnight and anywhere in between.” But he doesn’t expect his managers to follow suit. “We respond to [nonemergency] e-mail and voicemail messages either the same day or the next business day. Some managers do better than that,” Thayer says, but none are required to be on-call 24/7. And for Thayer, as for Carroccio, “respond” doesn’t mean solving the problem or answering the question — it just means acknowledging the message and promising a response or a solution within a reasonable time. Setting reasonable expectations is often easier to discuss in theory than to achieve on the job. “We talk about this (responding to clients) internally all the time,” Alexis says. “But managers who have been in the business for 10 years are still struggling with these questions.” A big part of the problem, she thinks, is that managers are by nature “people pleasers.” Their instinct is to

give clients the instant responses and quick solutions they want. “We have to train ourselves not to do that,” Alexis says. She used to send e-mails constantly, telling boards she met with the masonry contractor, or noted and followed up on a potential problem. “I don’t do that anymore, because that e-mail produces two more e-mails in return” creating a flow of information that becomes difficult, if not impossible, to manage.

Creating a “Monster”
The instinct to please, combined with anytime-anywhere communications technology, has “created a monster” for association managers, Carroccio believes. As technology increased the amount of information managers could provide and the speed with which they could communicate it, he explains, associations began to expect this level of service.

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Condo Media - November 2010

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