Talent Management - December 2008 - (Page 56)

“If they’re meeting expectations, they can earn anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of their base salary. If they exceed expectations at the end, when Harbor sells that property, they can make anything from as low as 25 percent on up to 200 percent of their salary. We sold a property here in Virginia, and the young lady got a $100,000 bonus.” Harbor doesn’t offer bonuses like that all the time. The incentive pay is directly linked to employees or the property team meeting or exceeding goals and expectations. For instance, the company offers a renewal bonus, paying incentives based on the number of renewals in a property and a percentage of the annual rent collected. Bates said a groundskeeper can walk home with another check for $300-400 because the whole team contributes to getting renewals, not just the leasing person or the manager. “Harbor shops leasing people twice a year, as well, and gets a report back that tells how they appear to the public when someone walks in. We’d share that with the leasing consultant: Here’s your strengths, your weaknesses; your presentation’s fantastic. Let’s talk about how you ask for the check.” This feedback pattern is a recurring feature in Harbor’s performance management strategy, and it produces visible results. “When a property’s working well, you know that team is working well. You can see it,” Bates explained. “When I talked to those managers and said, ‘Tell me about what you do with your team and how you do it,’ it is continuous feedback. A lot of the better property managers — besides the six-month formal review process — will sit down and ask how are we doing on our goals and objectives once a month, if not more often.” To close that continuous feedback loop, Harbor brings in the development piece, providing training to enhance an employees’ performance and organizational contributions. Development opportunities often are set up during the performance review process and have completion dates for employees to meet. “You may have a very good maintenance technician on a property who is certiﬁed just to work on heating and air-conditioning units. To build them up more, we’d send them to appliance school to learn how to work on refrigerators and dishwashers and things like that. That gives them more breadth of experience, but it’s also giving Harbor more depth because here’s another person that can answer when someone calls up and says, ‘Hey, my dishwasher’s not working.” “If you can get folks that really enjoy what they do and you give them the opportunity to do it at their best and reward them, they’re going to be happy.” – Ronald Bates, Former Vice President of Human Resources, Harbor Group Management Co. Dispensing signiﬁcant pay-for-performance rewards requires Harbor to measure workforce performance. Bates said this is partly done via a review form built around the roughly 16 different jobs in the organization, the competencies each requires and associated performance measures. “If I’m a leasing consultant, I’m looking at am I turning my leads into appointments? Am I turning my appointments into leases? What’s my closing ratio? Things like that. There are constant measures going on to hit the numbers, and it’s continuously improving. If the leasing consultant has a nice closing ratio of 42-43 percent, in the next performance review, we’d ask him or her to improve that to make it 46 or 48 percent if we know the trafﬁc’s going to be there and we’re going to get the opportunities to do a little bit better. But we’d provide them with more sales tools. “You’ve heard companies say, ‘It’s all about people, blah, blah, blah.’ In [the real estate] business, it truly is. It’s all about the folks you put in front of residents in apartment complexes and all about the people you put in front of tenants at a commercial site. I can’t stress that enough,” Bates said. “If you can get folks that really enjoy what they do and you give them the opportunity to do it at their best and reward them, they’re going to be happy.” In the next year, Bates said Harbor will introduce selfappraisals, 360 reviews and possibly execute some peer reviews, as well. “360 is going to be an interesting part of it. Harbor now does that at the senior level: Each partner does a review for their partner group, as well as two or three direct reports coming in to the partners, and they do a review. But [Harbor may] take it down to the regional manager level and to the property manager level.” 56 December 2008 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - December 2008

Talent Management - December 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Human Performance Leading Edge Foundations Recruitment & Retention Assessment & Evaluation Compensation & Benefits Performance Management Learning & Development Succession Planning Insight Dashboard Application Advertiser's Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - December 2008

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