Staying Local When Using Non-Local Talent for Guest Services

For the last couple of years, the hospitality industry has experienced increasing trends in labor shortage, worker churn, and operational costs, which make finding the right talent harder for property managers.

In this case, acquiring an outsourced staffing strategy to hire non-local team members enables property managers to reach a wider talent pool and delegate time-consuming, daily tasks. Consequently, it empowers property managers to maintain their operations in a more cost-effective and productive way.

Still, when it comes to hiring non-local talent for guest services, many property managers worry that cultural mismatches will occur during guest or resident communications.

Through this blog, we will clear up this myth. Let’s discover the ins and outs of staying local with remote team members.

Tips to Staying Local With Remote Team Members

If you are a serious operator in the property management industry, staying local with remote team members requires focusing on three critical aspects: creating a culturally aligned team, keeping employee engagement high, and finding the right outsourced staffing partner.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these aspects that will enable your property management business to thrive by expanding your operations with highly skilled, remote talent.

1. Create a Culturally Aligned Team

Culture alignment is the middle ground between “culture fit” and “culture add.” While culture fit refers to hiring familiar team members to preserve comfort within the team culture, culture add refers to looking for new team members who can both value the organizational culture and bring relatively new perspectives.

Balancing these two concepts by adopting the culture alignment approach creates a sense of unity within both your local and non-local teams. This creates an aligned team in which every individual invests their time and effort into shared aims and visions. Not surprisingly, cultural alignment can increase employee performance by up to 9%.

The cultural alignment approach motivates your non-local team members to provide great customer service from the perspective of their culture, needs, and requests.

Still, building a culturally aligned team that includes non-local team members can be challenging if you don’t have an experienced HR team or an outsourcing partner with a sharp focus on the property management ecosystem.

2. Keep Employee Engagement High

In the current labor market, employee turnover in property management has expanded by 70%. Increasing employee churn has become a major issue for property managers who are operating short-term rental businesses as shifting team members can both create a poor image for business owners and increase costs.

In fact, the cost of replacing an individual employee can cost 50% more than an employee’s annual salary.

Employee engagement is instrumental in reducing these churn rates.  Engagement increases productivity, improves work culture, and leads to better business and guest relations by turning team members into happy advocates of your business.

Sharing your company culture, vision, and mission with your remote employees and caring about employee wellbeing is key to keeping your non-local teams engaged. In turn, this sparks them to act as an extension of your business, not as a separate team.

So instead of recruiting local employees who have high expectations of salary and flexibility, keeping highly skilled, non-local talent on board by improving employee engagement is a wise alternative to staying local.

Keep in mind, team members’ happiness has a positive effect on guest/tenant satisfaction and a good customer experience impacts a property manager’s reputation, revenue, and growth.

3. Find the Right Remote Talent Outsourcing Partner

It is clear that benefitting from both staying local and having dedicated remote team members is possible for property managers. Indeed, hiring the right non-local team members can increase your business performance.

This means to build and scale more efficient, productive, and profitable operations with your remote team members, you should find a reliable outsourcing partner.

Your talent outsourcing partner should be able to identify your specific needs and find the right remote team members who speak your customers’ language, fit with their culture, understand their needs perfectly, and bring value to your guest service operations.

Additionally, managing a property management business with non-local talent is a two-way street. Both you and your remote team members should emphasize responsibility, operate in a scalable way, and keep up honest and clear communication.

Therefore, your outsourcing partner should be able to work simultaneously with both parties and consistently track your employees’ performance.

Extenteam Is Here to Help!

It is clear that staying local when using non-local talent for your guest and resident communications is all about finding ideal remote team members and cultivating them with a clear company culture. And when backed up with strong employee engagement, these remote team members can bring more opportunities to your rental business and boost the success of your guest communication operations.

As the #1 trusted remote staffing solution, Extenteam is dedicated to finding experienced, bilingual, and highly-skilled remote team members that will value your guest communications operations!