Tips to Hire, Train, and Retain Great Maintenance Technicians

Whether you are large or small, seasoned or new, those with an in-house maintenance team know it is a critical component to the backbone of your multifamily operation. Sound maintenance will positively impact building upkeep, resident retention and satisfaction, cash flow, and overall asset values. It can also serve as a tremendous profit center for 3rd party management groups and simultaneous benefit to owner clients.

 
Here is the obvious kicker: creating a great maintenance team is incredibly difficult. The labor market is fluid, training is challenging, and maintenance personnel have less day-to-day oversight than the average office employee. So, how do you navigate these obstacles to position yourself for sustained success? While I have not unearthed some cheat code or maintenance-hack that will change your luck overnight, over years of trial, error, failure, and success, a few principles and practices have produced noticeable results. Such practices can be organized into 3 categories: Hiring, training, and retaining.

 
Hiring is easily the most widespread frustration among multifamily operators I interact with. First, make sure you have a strong, well thought-out job description. Bad maintenance technician candidates will base their decision to apply solely on the premise of pay. To frame it another way, let’s say you post a job for a Property Manager, with no detail on what an average day will look like, no information about the types of buildings they will manage, and no information on the company and culture. If someone applied for that role without questioning anything about it, would you have reservations about hiring them? Maintenance technicians are no different. There are a variety of skillsets in the maintenance world and differing personalities, each with unique motivations and career aspirations. Those who are great genuinely care about what they do day-to-day, take pride in their work, and understand themselves well-enough to know what specific maintenance work they wish to be doing. By writing a clear, detailed, and honest job description, you will eliminate bad actor applicants and attract good people to the role. Maintenance technicians are not one-size-fits-all, so your job description cannot be either. As you begin to source and find the right talent, the second hiring tip that has been effective is a referral program. Great maintenance technicians typically have other friends in the same line of work. Who doesn’t want to work with their friends and get paid a bonus to do it? By offering, say, a $500 referral to any tech who brings in a referral who pans out, you will scale more efficiently and cost-effectively. Lastly, offer paid working interviews. You do not necessarily have to marry a maintenance technician from the jump. Establish a working interview period that provides a chance to validate their skills and reliability.

So, now you have successfully hired a good fit for your maintenance team, woohoo! However, it is very rare that you can simply send that tech into the field without encountering issues. Great long-term techs are not necessarily perfect; some have less hands-on-experience than they may need, some may require coaching on culture and the standards of, say, your unit turn vs. company ABC that they worked for previously, and some may struggle with technology. Each will need some form of course correction and training, and each will have unique hurdles to initially overcome. Make sure, especially in the first 2-3 weeks of employment, that the tech has a supervisor available in real-time, as needed. Additionally, have your existing team shadow the new hire from time-to-time. This will also help the new tech make work-friends and feel like they are part of a team. After the first few weeks of onboarding, though, training needs do not simply halt. Building systems and infrastructure change and become more complex over time. Repair standards also change, and perhaps what worked in the past is no longer compliant or acceptable. As with most aspects of your business, the maintenance sector is constantly evolving; if you do not provide ongoing education, your team will fall behind, or worse yet, leave. Thankfully, there are many maintenance educational resources in the market, including those hosted by AAMD.

Finally, retention. While everyone focuses on hiring, maintenance tech retention is often pushed to the backburner. If your team is a revolving door and you cannot keep good techs, your employer costs skyrocket, the overall quality of work will falter, and you will not have maintenance leaders in the pipeline supporting growth. Good maintenance technicians do not become great maintenance technicians until they have had time to get in a rhythm. First, yes, you need to pay your maintenance technicians. It is absolutely not worth shortchanging a great technician at the expense of losing them. Housing discounts also carry weight if you are able to offer it, though I recommend they be employed for some time before immediately offering a discounted lease. Pay and housing are just one piece of the “retention pie,” however. Provide your maintenance personnel not only field-level training, but give them an outlet to tell you how they are doing, how they are feeling, and where they want to go both personally and professionally. Also, give them feedback. They will not get better if you do not show them the path to doing so. Your maintenance technicians are people, and people crave human connection. While pay is one expression of caring for your people, it is not the whole picture. We conduct monthly 1-on-1 sessions with a supervisor, and frequently host maintenance breakfast outings where the crew can simply hang out with one another and decompress. We also invite our technicians to quarterly updates so they have a sense of organizational direction. In the same vein of caring for your people and talking to them frequently, you will find technicians have other priorities outside of pay. Some may have families and want to be home by a certain time, or perhaps they need to pick up or drop off kids at school. Others may have side businesses and wish to work part time. In either of these cases, if you can make a revised schedule work, you should. If you had the choice of 1 mediocre full-time tech, vs. 2 part-time, awesome techs, would you not choose the latter all-else equal? Lastly, recognize your technicians for great work. Bonuses are great, however, public recognition is also an incredible tool in your arsenal.

Ultimately, you get out what you put in. If you make a great effort to hire, pour resources into your team, and devote yourself to culture, you can transform maintenance from a weakness to a strength.