Building engineers are the unsung heroes of property management teams. They are the gears in the machine driving your tenant service delivery. But too often property teams treat them as an afterthought.

When a problem arises for a tenant, an engineer is often one of the first faces they see to help solve it. So an engineers’ knowledge of how to solve issues quickly and efficiently is absolutely crucial. They are a linchpin for healthy tenant relationships with a property. Engineers set and manage tenant expectations, and promote engagement with a building’s resources.

Happy Building Engineers Help Make for Happy Tenants

Tenants are more likely to stay and renew their lease in a building featuring the best resources and staff. This is especially true for a building that is well organized, and where their needs are met in a timely fashion. If tenants perceive a building engineer to be unfriendly or ineffective, it’s easy for them to lose faith in their property managers. This can lead to them leaving the building and taking their business elsewhere.

Simply put, it isn’t enough for your building engineers to know what they’re doing. They need to be friendly, courteous, and approachable as well. You want them to be happy.

How to Improve a Building Engineer’s Happiness

To improve engineer happiness—and thus tenant happiness—property managers must build confidence in their maintenance team, and vice versa.

Confidence requires an open line of communication between the property management and engineering teams. This ensures transparency for engineers and the property management team. Sometimes this can require a change in procedure or adopting new tools, such as facility management software.

Here are some of the best ways to better connect with your building engineers, communicate effectively, work smarter, and improve engineers’ overall happiness.

Always Keep an Open Line of Communication

Your team, like your tenants, needs to know they can reach you when needed.

Maintain an open line of communication through regular meetings and easy to use communications tools. Be a resource they can reach out to. This way you ensure engineers have confidence they’re always providing accurate information to tenants.

Give Building Engineers the Tools and Training They Need

Ensure your engineers feel confident performing maintenance—and in the technologies that assist them. This gives tenants more confidence in the people maintaining their work space.

Engineers working for you should already have some degree of training and certification, such as Building Operator Certification at minimum. Consider helping them gain greater skills, with a course accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.

An effective way to improve engineers’ productivity is with building operations software tools. One example is Building Engines’ Prism mobile app. It puts all work order and maintenance tasks in your pocket, with offline access to floor plans and historical information, so they can be more self-reliant while on-duty.

Regularly connect on duties and tasks

Stress has a huge impact on human happiness. Prevent avoidable stress by keeping your engineers up-to-date on their work queue on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. (And make sure their work queue is prioritized.)

A great way to minimize uncertainty for engineers is to use a building operations system that precisely tracks maintenance, tasks, and service delivery performance, so no work is repeated or overlooked. There are several platforms available for residential, commercial, industrial, and retail properties.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

When engineers do their jobs efficiently and to a high level of quality, this keeps tenants satisfied, which means happy property managers. And on the flip side, building engineers are happy when they get their work done without logistics or technology getting in the way.

What is the connecting factor? The need to minimize communications barriers, and streamline workflows.

When you have happy engineers, they’re better at getting ahead of maintenance needs before they blow up—sometimes literally—in your face. Discover how engineers can be more systematic in their preventative maintenance program by downloading Building Engines’ free checklist: How to Maximize ROI from Your Preventive Maintenance Program.