Kicking off the new year with Organization

Everyone does it. Around this time of year as the year winds down we start making resolutions for the New Year. These are promises to ourselves that we will “stick to our guns” about getting better at something. Although only about 25% of resolutions stick, I often think about the resolutions I make for myself. I like to set goals for what I can accomplish personally, but every year I try to make at least one resolution that will affect me professionally. I try to see what will make me better this year at my job and stick to it. I think one of the hardest jobs we have when doing apartment maintenance is to stay organized. It’s hard to put that part back where it belongs or take time to sweep the floor in the shop when we are slammed.

But what if this was a promise we kept all year long? How much time will we save ourselves by taking the few minutes or so to stay organized. There are several things we can do this year to help us. They reach far beyond a clean shop. We need to stay organized for our residents too. Here are some ways to work smart, not hard.

1. Clean up!! Yep. Simple as that. Start the New Year off by getting your shops organized. The best way I have done this in the past has been to gut it-then put it back. That may not be how you decide to clean and organize but the goal is to get your shops in a position to where it is easy to get to and find your parts. By doing this, this will save you money by seeing exactly what parts you need for inventory. This is also helpful for any other shops and storage areas you have as well. Being this time of year is slower too, staying organized will make you more efficient when it starts to get busy is a couple months. Below is a general color code for your shop.

1. Plumbing-Blue
2. HVAC-Yellow
3. Electrical-Red
4. Painting-Black
5. Lighting- Orange
6. Appliances-White
7. Hardware-Brown

2.  Maintenance in the office- Another way to stay organized is to make it easy for the whole staff to access the work order area. Every office has a maintenance area where work orders and general maintenance items are stored. These areas are often cluttered as well with supplier catalogs, flyers and miscellaneous notes. A good way to organize is to make a couple of bins that either hang on the wall or sit on a desk that can be labeled for easy identification. Here are a couple ideas for your bins:

1. Work orders
2. Pending work orders
3. Completed work orders

By having these bins, it is easy for anyone on staff to see what could be going on. For example: if a resident calls and asks about the garbage disposal status, an office team member can look in the pending work order bin and see that there are notes saying that the disposal is on order. This will help everyone make their job easy.

3.  Follow a resident reach out program- A good way to stay on top of things is to follow up. This is extremely important to do in this industry. If you don’t have one already, create a program where you call residents back to make sure the work order that was called in was fixed correctly. This is good to do towards the end of the week. By doing so, it assures that if you have to go back for any reason, it can be handled by the weekend and avoid an after hours call. It will also show great customer service!!!

4.  Follow a preventative maintenance program- There is nothing more important than this step right here. By following a preventative maintenance program, you can catch a problem before it starts. This is not only critical to staying organized, but will also save so much time on the property. There are a few forms in our preventative maintenance section on the home page that can give you a start.

This is a good start to helping get a property organized. There are many other ways as well to making a property run smooth. Organization has to be at the top of the list or the time that is spent on the opposite side can really hurt a properties performance !!

Happy New Year !!!