What the Pandemic Has Taught Us About Working Remotely

The COVID-19 pandemic has worn everyone down — but the people who’ve been leading during a year of remote community association management say there are lessons all managers can take from this experience:

The first is that work-from-home is here to stay. “Being into this now just under a year, remote working has actually worked out well for our company,” says Paul Grucza, director of education and client development at the Seattle-based management company CWD Group, Inc. “We fully intend to retain remote working in one form or another.”

Grucza, in fact, sees many advantages from this new way of working, including time savings. “I have one building in Seattle that I would go to every Friday to meet with the building engineer,” he says. “Now we do it by Zoom.

“I meet with vendors virtually, too, and I haven’t lost one footstep. The quality of the product we provide hasn’t slipped one iota. Remote working works.”

For Brad van Rooyen, president of HomeRiver Group-Florida, the management company for about 160 associations in the state, the pandemic just expedited a planned shift to remote work.

“We were already slowly transitioning toward allowing employees to work remotely as an option, and it just got moved ahead by 24 months. Our employees had laptops, iPads, and soft phones that let you connect to your work phone from anywhere over the Internet. We were cloud-based and didn’t rely on servers so we didn’t have to worry about getting people connected.

“We shut down on a Friday and were fully operational Monday at 8:00 a.m. without skipping a beat.”

Van Rooyen isn’t resting on these laurels, though. “You have to continually think about what could be on the horizon,” he says. “We’re going to be paying more attention to the technologies that are developing that can help manage teams remotely, like Monday.com, which is geared to help remote leaders plan, organize, and track their team’s work. We had the equipment already but not the management tools.”

For three other key pandemic takeaways, read the full article now:

4 Lessons from Remote Property Management

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President