Does this sound familiar?
It’s 7:43 on a Tuesday morning. You’re a condominium manager with a busy job, a busy life, and a lukewarm coffee you’ve been trying to drink for 45 minutes.
Your phone buzzes. It’s an email from a resident asking when the A/C will be turned on for the season.
You answered this in April’s newsletter.
You posted it on the bulletin board.
You emailed it. Twice.
You are now answering it again, in your car, before 8am, for the fourth time this month.
This is just one example of a common condo communication failure and it could be costing you and your building far more than you realize.
When we talk about condo costs, we usually talk about reserve funds, insurance premiums, contractor bids, and special assessments. Nobody builds a line item for communication failure, but they probably should.
Here’s what poor communication actually costs a condo community:
Manager time. Every repeated question is a task that didn’t need to happen. Every phone call about something that was already posted is 10 minutes gone. Multiply that across 200 units, 52 weeks, and a property manager juggling four buildings, and you start to understand why good managers burn out and why boards have trouble keeping them.
In her book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity,Gloria Mark at UC Irvine put a number on what it costs you. After a single interruption, it takes an average of 25 minutes to fully return to the original task.
This puts a dollar figure on your time. At $70 thousand dollars per year, a one minute conversation costs 58 cents.
That might not sound like much, but if the average conversation is more than a minute, it adds up. Dozens of times a day? Even more! And if it takes 25 minutes to get back to what you were doing, that’s an additional whopping $14.50 per interruption!
But the bigger cost to a manager is work/life balance. All that repetition means missed soccer games, school plays or nights out on the town. (Or binge watching Netflix till 2am instead of midnight!) Distractions lead to stress, non-productivity and eventual burnout, and that cost can be immeasurable.
Resident trust.Next, think about the frustration residents feel when there’s a lack of communication. Silence can lead to negative assumptions and rumours.
The #1 complaint at AGMs is quite often “lack of communication” but some residents who feel uninformed don’t always complain loudly. Sometimes they just stop engaging; they skip the AGM, they don’t vote or provide a proxy. And then one day you need quorum and you don’t have it, you need a new board director and nobody wants to run for the board or you need community buy-in on a major project and you’re met with suspicion instead of support.
Escalations that didn’t need to happen.I’m willing to bet that most formal complaints (the ones that land with lawyers, the ones that get filed with the Condominium Authority Tribunal) don’t start as formal complaints.
Many escalations and complaints are rooted in simple misunderstandings that could have been avoided with clear and proactive communication. It’s important to communicate to people that things like 200 lb dogs and balconies converted to full-on farm gardens simply aren’t allowed.
Every month the CAT reports cases involving records requests, noise complaints and more, that could possibly have been avoided with good communication and resident education.
Small problems becoming expensive ones. The average high-rise condo communicates around 23 notices per month, and nearly ALL of those notices are maintenance-related, not educational, which is important because it’s the educational stuff that usually has the most financial impact and/or can land your condo corporation on the evening news. (More on this later.)
That means important info gets missed, like how to spot a water leak (or simple water conservation in general), garbage room rules that weren’t reinforced until there was a car bumper tossed down one (dude, what’s THAT doing in your suite!?), renovation Section 98 reminders that came out after someone already caused damage to common elements. Proactive communication is cheap. Reactive repairs are not!
(Makes me think of the condo owner in British Columbia who was told to pay nearly $55,000 after his tenant allegedly flushed cat litter down the toilet, causing major plumbing issues.)
One more thing… a lot of the people responsible for communication are volunteers, aka board directors.
If you’re a board director reading this, you probably didn’t run for the board because you love writing newsletters. You likely ran because you care about where you live, or because someone needed to step up, or because you got volun-told by your peers. Communication strategy was probably not even mentioned in the job description you signed up for.
The good news is that better condo communication doesn’t mean more work. It means different work. Specifically, it means shifting from reactive (answering the same questions over and over) to proactive (making sure the answer is visible before the question gets asked).
Proactive communication means fewer complaints, less friction, more trust, lower legal exposure and more time (and money!) for other things.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to walk through what proactive condo communication actually looks like in practice; the specific things boards and managers can do to get ahead of the questions, the complaints, and the escalations that are eating everyone’s time.
We’ll cover what it means to communicate before you need to (not after someone is already annoyed), the five principles that make building communication actually work, and real examples from the kinds of issues every condo deals with – garbage, pets, parking, AGMs, seasonal reminders, the whole greatest-hits album.
If you’ve ever answered the same question twice in one week, this series is for you.
And if you’ve answered it four times before 8am on a Tuesday, pull up a chair! We have a lot to talk about 🙂
 Contact Digi-Notice to prepare your communication strategy today. Contact phil@digi-notice.com or sue@digi-notice.com
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