5 Best Practices to Enhance Your Work Order Lifecycle

The indoor and outdoor environments of residential communities must be maintained on a regular basis to provide a comfortable living experience for your residents, maintain a safe and clean environment on your premises for everyone, be in compliance with regulations, and enhance brand integrity of your community management.  To deliver on those goals, it is essential to keep track of all issues so that nothing falls through the cracks, no matter how big or small the issue is.  Community managers have the challenging task of making life cycle processes more efficient.  Here, we emphasize on five best practices you as a manager can implement to make the work order process smoother and completely in line with company objectives.  

1. Educate your team and residents on how to identify problems

Make sure that your personnel understands how to identify problems, classify problems by level of urgency, and take the appropriate action.  Schedule a training program as part of new staff on-boarding.  Additionally, hold regular training sessions for your team, preferably before each season starts.  Likewise, residents also need to be informed on how to identify problems before they escalate.  To help your residents spot problems that cannot be identified easily, you may opt to write short articles and upload them to a knowledge base your residents can easily access.  

2. Maintain an organized system for the entire work order life cycle

When service requests come in abundance from your residents, it is important to create and maintain an organized system for filing in those requests and seeing them through fulfillment.  Ensure that the system you use for filing work orders permits you to input the most essential details and allows you to move with ease from one phase to another.  Also, ensure your work order management software provides reports for both stale work orders that fell through the cracks as well as new ones that just came in.

3. Assign a company personnel or vendor to solve the issue

When you acknowledge a new work order or maintenance request from your resident, assign a company personnel to track it from identification to resolution.  Then, based on the type of service requested or problem identified, select your preferred vendor and schedule them to come in.  Tracking ensures better accountability among staff members to resolve an important issue and be on top of their tasks.  

4. Keep your residents in the loop

Communicate with your residents on the status of the service requests throughout the process.  Implement a process for keeping them informed either through a web portal, email, text, or a phone call, based on what they prefer. 

5. Monitor efficiency of work order process/resolution and revise workflow strategy

Create a goal to monitor the efficiency of your work order life cycle process from problem identification to problem resolution every 6 months or a year.  Use the data and feedback you receive from your monitoring efforts to revise the strategy and update your workflow for better results.