Facility Managers Should Tackle Complaints Head-On
April 9, 2014
For facility managers, complaints are a fact of daily life. Tackling them head-on is usually the best strategy, rather than ignoring them and hoping they go away.
A good example of why that's true comes from Larry Virts, local president of BOMA Corpus Christi and property manager with REOC San Antonio. Sometimes Virts says he feels more like a high school principal. He inherited a tenant mix with glaring differences in work and life styles. In one corner, a call center making up about 25 percent of the building's population, filled with very young employees who are loud, brash, and often not used to working in a professional setting — at least as evidenced by their behavior. In the other corner, everybody else.
And worse, the call center was clogging the elevators. The tight scheduling typical of a call center was causing this set of employees to enter and leave the facility in large groups. Where other tenants had been always been able to get on an elevator in 40 seconds, now they were waiting two, three, or more minutes — an eternity. The complaints rolled in. When Virts hired on, he resolved to improve the situation.
"The tenant had assumed that complaints made about them were because of their appearance and their loudness, their unrestrained youth," Virts says. "I think they just assumed that it was a personality clash, never realizing they could make it better."
After first cultivating a relationship with the call center's management, Virts says he approached them in a calm manner to find a reasonable solution to the issue. They were very receptive and a compromise was found in staggering start times and break times to relieve long waits for the elevator. It has helped the situation, some, he says.
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