Optimizing Team Performance: Key Practices for Real Estate Brokerages
Aristotle once said, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” To exemplify this, if you took your smartphone apart and laid the pieces on the table, it’d be evident that each piece has its own value, function, and specific mechanisms. But when you put all those pieces together, you get a powerhouse piece of technology.
Real estate brokerages need to look at their team in this way. A brokerage isn’t simply a roster of rockstar agents; rather, it’s a smart, strategic team synchronizing their strengths, skills, and talent to achieve common goals effectively. Team success is always crucial, but in an uncertain market, brokerages need to prioritize investing in their team’s growth.
Teamwork comes with countless benefits, and for your bottom line, an effective, powerhouse team can make all the difference. A Gallup study found companies with engaged employees can see a 23% increase in profitability. By aligning your team and setting them up for success, your brokerage can thrive in even the most challenging circumstances.
Real Ways to Optimize Your Team’s Performance
What does it mean to optimize team performance, anyway? In short, optimal team performance means everyone is working efficiently towards common goals. To do this, brokerages need to set their agents up for real, consistent success. Here’s how to do it.
Regular Training and Development Opportunities
Investing in your agents’ training and development regularly goes a long way. They’ll stay on top of the SOPs and processes you’re developing to keep your brokerage’s transactions running smoothly in a changing market and industry. Agents can also expand their selling, marketing, and communications skills with training and development. It’s also a great way to position them to enhance their leadership, negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills.
Investing in regular training and building up your team’s hard and soft skills will also ensure their abilities are consistent across the group. This helps position your brokerage for long-term success. Providing educational opportunities also helps employees feel motivated, inspired, and invested in by leadership, helping bolster retention rates.
Clear Communication Channels
To keep your team engaged and focused on the brokerage’s goals, you need to communicate with them regularly and clearly. This looks like using consistent forms of outreach, like email and in-office chat systems. It also looks like holding regularly scheduled meetings, providing opportunities to share — and receive — feedback, and providing timely updates. This keeps your team in the loop, and also provides them with ample opportunity to know when and what they can hear from you.
Having clear, consistent communication helps them feel up to speed with any changes and confident in anticipating updates on progress. It also helps eliminate uncertainty and ambiguity, so expectations are clear and the standards of communication are set.
Consistent Performance Tracking
The entire team is marching toward a shared set of goals, but how will they know if and how they’re making progress towards those goals? By having (and sharing) regular performance tracking. You can compile your performance reports manually in spreadsheets, or try to make sense of what’s happening in your CRM. Or, you can use a smart tool like BoldTrail BackOffice, which has a centralized agent management hub to keep your team on track. It also boasts robust reporting and analytics you can easily use at a glance to see how your brokerage is performing. Couple these findings with your clear communication for impactful, action-oriented meetings to optimize your team.
Smart Collaborative Tools
You simply can’t have teamwork without collaboration, and thankfully, there’s plenty of smart tech tools and software to make team collaboration seamless. Investing in tools to streamline and centralize your agents’ collaboration will help keep everyone out of silos and increase visibility into what each team member is doing. This helps build trust through transparency, make collaboration and communication more accessible, and provides brokerage leaders with a tangible platform to keep the team up to speed.
Supportive, Transparent Leadership
What makes achieving optimized team performance a reality, rather than just an idea or goal? The team’s leaders. If you want to maximize your team’s performance, motivation, and hunger to achieve your brokerage’s goals, the tips above will help. But these techniques won’t work without supportive, honest leadership. You set the bar for your team and provide the guidance of how they’ll get there. As a broker, you take the lead, set standards, and hold your team accountable, so they have the space to thrive in their areas of expertise and unique skill sets. Make sure you’re staying on top of your leadership skills and training, lead from a place of empathy and inspiration, and operate honestly. When your team knows they can count on you, they’re more likely to go above and beyond to help your brokerage achieve true success.
For more help supporting your brokerage’s front and back office operations, so you can smash your goals and free up time to optimize team performance, you need BoldTrail. BoldTrail, real estate’s growth engine, was designed to help brokerages boost their ROI, productivity, and their growth, all in one seamless, centralized ecosystem.