#42- We Paid Our Employees NOT to Work...Here's What Happened
Who knew a drive down a country road, listening to an episode of the By the Book podcast would spark an idea to pay our employees NOT to work?
This week, I want to let you in on a little behind-the-scenes experiment we kicked off with our Sprout Marketing team in Q3 of 2020. My hope is that hearing about our successful experiment inspires multifamily executives and leaders to think outside the box when it comes to finding new solutions to another worldwide epidemic - employee overwhelm and burnout. You guys…this is a real thing. COVID has only magnified a problem that has already existed for years. The amount of pressure our teams are under is unreal. Hop on to some of the Facebook groups from time-time to see what our property management teams are dealing with if you haven’t been onsite for a while.
Here are a few of my favorite multifamily housing facebook groups:
The Official Apartment Management & Maintenance Support Group
Just Another Day In The Apartment Business...
*Note: Private groups require admin approval to join.
Our own feeling of pre-burnout
While we aren’t onsite, we are privileged to support thousands of communities and the individuals that make up the onsite teams. As summer 2020 was winding down, Lauren and I were both feeling the effects of everything 2020 had thrown at us thus far. We had been in a constant state of adrenaline rush since March, making daily adjustments to our business to help meet the needs of our Sprout members. Every day the onsite teams were needing to communicate notices and changes to their residents and we were creating flyers, social graphics, and videos to help them do that.
There were a lot of plans that had to be scrapped, hard decisions made and goals adjusted to face the current reality. While many of the adjustments we made had positive results, we were still just worn out-physically and emotionally.
We knew if we were feeling that way, our team had to be also.
Just like so many of you, the uncertainty of the times and the “new normal” was starting to really show wear and tear.
Something that kept running through my mind is one of my favorite quotes:
“When things aren’t adding up, start subtracting.”
That week, the hosts of By the Book, were chatting about the book Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee. The author talked about how the human body is designed to engage and then REST. But our society has gotten to the place where we are obsessed with optimizing and leveraging every minute of our day. We get our worth from our job. Our status is BUSY. We wear it as a badge of honor. And its leading to burnout.
My ears were on FIRE. This episode spoke to me on so many levels. After listening, I bought AND devoured the book cover to cover, furiously highlighting and bookmarking page after page. I’ll let you watch the video to hear how I “forced” Lauren to tune in.
Let’s jump to the part where we decided to make some changes.
Flex-Time for Our entire sprout marketing Team:
We implemented flex time. As Lauren likes to say, “Time on the clock, that’s off the clock!” We decided to give all our employees, both full-time and part-time, 10% of their time paid to use however they wanted. The only rule was they couldn’t use it to work. So if an employee worked forty hours per week, they could have four of those hours completely off the clock to do whatever they wanted.
I don’t want to spoil the show so tune in to learn:
The logistics of how we rolled this out
The teamwork that was required for scheduling
Hear from our team - how it’s impacted their life
Stay until the end for ideas on how you could implement something similar
The Benefits of Flex Time
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