Maintenance has always been a nearly impossible-to-solve piece of the multifamily puzzle. Between a never-ending list of work orders for technicians to tackle and the ever-worsening labor shortage, hiring and retaining top technicians can feel like fighting an uphill battle.
At HappyCo, we’re strong believers that streamlining your maintenance workflows and centralizing your operations is the solution. While you might be skeptical that increasing your onsite team’s results at a fraction of the cost is a possibility, this blog post will show you exactly how to do just that.
Our first-ever technology-enabled service solution, Happy Force, provides your teams with remote maintenance technicians who have decades of multifamily experience at a significantly lower cost than a full-time team member.
But enough about us. This is about you - your teams and your residents - and how we can help you optimize your maintenance experience.
3 Ways Happy Force Technicians Help You Exceed Your Maintenance Goals
On average, we’re seeing that turnover for onsite maintenance teams is at 39%. Many communities simply don’t have the budget and time to hire and retain experienced technicians, with payroll costs rising rapidly and work-life balance challenges for on-call team members.
Here’s how we can help mitigate that.
1. Reduce New Hires Required & Increase Payroll Savings
With infamously high turnover rates and a shortage of new talent, it seems like there are always vacancies on the maintenance team. But, hiring takes time and money - and even when you put in the effort, it’s really hard to find new technicians at a competitive rate. Especially when you consider taxes, insurance, and training costs, the price of hiring a new technician has skyrocketed.
With Happy Force, there’s no more screening resumes and scheduling interviews, or worrying if the technician you hired will actually show up for their first day of work. All of our remote technicians are pre-vetted, and all have at least three to five years, or more, of experience in multifamily maintenance.
Because Happy Force minimizes your need to expand your onsite team, you can map the cost directly to a payroll line item. With an average cost of a part-time technician for around-the-clock coverage, you can conserve budget and increase NOI, without sacrificing on quality of service.
2. Boost Your Onsite Maintenance Team’s Performance
Let’s clarify one thing - Happy Force isn’t a replacement for your onsite maintenance technicians. Instead, think of Happy Force as a partner to your teams (one who does way more than morning coffee runs).
Happy Force remote technicians are the first line of defense, protecting your onsite team from quick fixes and non-emergency after-hours calls that make them get out of bed in the middle of the night.
It’s easy for residents, too, as they can scan a QR code, submit a work order on their phones, and text or chat with a remote technician within minutes, not days, to help them solve everyday issues themselves, like a broken outlet or a clogged drain.
Our technicians will scope and triage all incoming work orders, contacting each resident, and coaching them through solvable tickets. For those work orders we can't complete entirely, we'll add troubleshooting details and notes from our resident call so that your onsite teams have complete clarity to fix the issue on their first unit visit.
3. Increase Your Team’s Happiness, Reducing Turnover and Creating a Healthier Community
We created Happy Force to make your technicians' lives easier and improve resident satisfaction. Not only will it save you from recruiting and hiring, you'll also be providing your maintenance teams with a higher quality of life. And, Happy Force seamlessly connects into your existing work order management system, so there’s no need to train your techs on another platform.
With Happy Force, you can limit overtime and on-call hours, creating a better work-life balance for your onsite teams. You’re also allowing them to spend more time on high-level work, rather than going back and forth with residents trying to get to the root cause of an issue. Nothing shows you’re investing in your workers’ future better than eliminating tedious busywork.
At the end of the day, it's all about making your operations as efficient as possible and streamlining processes so that you minimize time wasted. When your maintenance teams are happy, your residents are happy, creating a great environment to work and to live.
Ever since she was a kid, Ebby has always loved reading, writing, and storytelling. After graduating from College of Charleston in 2018, Ebby started a career in marketing for start-ups and scale-ups and never looked back. She's thrilled that she now gets to share HappyCo's stories across formats and channels for a living.
