Creating a real estate team can improve the efficiency of your business. It is important, however, to make sure that your team is doing everything in their power to ensure productivity is as high as possible. Having a team who doesn’t work well together won’t help your business any more than you trying to do the jobs of 5 people.
Communication is arguably one of the most important skills not only in business, but in life. Communication can either sinks a business, or helps a business to thrive. If your team members aren’t communicating, they aren’t working together as a team… and that’s a problem. Communication ensures that the “ball is never dropped” and the more, the better. It might seem silly, but there really is no such thing as too much communication. If one of your team members is going to be out of the office, the team needs to be informed so that they can either pick up the slack, or look elsewhere for assistance. Your team should communicate with their team members the same way that they would communicate with a client: listen, ask the right questions, be positive and mind their tone.
Pro Tip: if it takes more than two emails to explain and your team members still aren’t understanding, it’s time to have an in person conversation so that the task is done correctly.
It is extremely important to have defined job roles. When the job roles aren’t defined, there is room for error because there isn’t any structure within the team. Having defined job roles can help to keep your team focused on their tasks, rather than doing tasks that should be done by someone else. It can also prevent issues among team members regarding what their title entails. Every member’s role should be clear from the beginning to them, and to the team. This isn’t to say that sometimes there will be overlap in case of an absence, but for the most part job duties will be separate.
It is so easy to spread yourself thin and do a million things at once, but remember that you have a team for a reason. Utilize each member’s specialty so that your team can be efficient at everything that they do. If one member of the team seems to be falling behind because they have too much going on, either hire someone else to join the team or try to more evenly distribute duties. Your team members should have plenty to do, but never so much that they are overwhelmed and cut corners to get the job done.
Have you ever said to yourself, “I’ll do that later.” Great, me too. This is fine, except sometimes that email that we said we would get back to, gets forgotten. It seems like responding to that email, or calling that client back would take more time, but in the long run, doing tasks as soon as possible saves you time and effort. This ensures that you only have to deal with the issue one time, rather than having to go back and apologize for the delayed call or email.
When it comes to a team, there’s never such thing as ‘too much communication.’ It is important for each member to understand their role and why it is important and to have structure within the business so the team can also have structure. Play to your team members strengths because that’s what they are there for, right?