It’s no secret—the United States is mired in the midst of a skilled labor shortage. Getting young people interested in the trades, providing affordable training, and highlighting new career pathways have only done so much to offset the gap left behind by retiring baby boomers. How is this impacting property management? Operators around the country are feeling more of a squeeze than ever to retain top facilities talent.
One key factor to acknowledge is that language barriers have traditionally been an obstacle on the facilities side of the house. Management companies have had to either turn down candidates who might have the technical knowhow but lack the ability to communicate in English, or relegate them to roles where they weren’t required to interact with residents. Fortunately, there’s a powerful new tool designed to overcome language barriers and expand the talent pool for property management companies: AI-powered real time translation.
With AI-powered translation capabilities built directly into property management platforms, property management companies no longer have to choose between technical skills and English proficiency when hiring. By unlocking a key gateway to new talent pools, operators using this technology can get ahead in today's tight labor market while also offering inclusive and empowering experiences for their team members.
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AI-Powered Translation: Opening Doors to Untapped Talent Pools
Today, management companies are often forced to make a difficult choice: whether or not to hire a talented technician in spite of language barriers that could impact their ability to efficiently solve resident’s issues. This language barrier becomes an exclusionary factor that limits workforce participation for certain subsets of the population. Unlike other industries where there’s an abundant supply of talent, the limiting factors of the maintenance space means any additional barriers or blockers for talent are even more consequential than they would be in other industries.
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AI-powered real-time translation capabilities enable multilingual maintenance workforces to more successfully support their residents, empowering technicians to own repairs end-to-end, and speeding work order completion times. Management companies who leverage AI platforms for facilities, like EliseAI’s new Maintenance App, can now hire the best technicians, regardless of the languages they speak. This technology significantly expands the available maintenance technician labor pool by reducing barriers to entry, expanding workforce access, and creating meaningful opportunities for those who have technical skills but can’t speak English well.
While expanding workforce access is an impactful and noble consequence of AI-powered real-time translation, one significant question still needs to be resolved—what is the impact on NOI and the resident experience?
The Ripple Effect of AI Translation: Improved Staffing, Happier Residents, Lower Costs
With AI-powered real-time translation capabilities built into property management tools, like EliseAI’s Maintenance App, operators can expect to see a number of significant improvements to their operating efficiency, resident satisfaction, and hiring patterns. For one, having access to an expanded talent pool can significantly reduce hiring challenges and limit the impact of turnover on your operations, providing additional consistency for your maintenance staff. Second, better staffing patterns can result in faster maintenance response times, improving resident satisfaction through expedited work order completion. This could impact online reputation through improved review scores, as well as potentially could increase renewal rates.
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Having more qualified technicians at their disposal also reduces the amount of work operators need to outsource to external contractors or vendors. Now, instead of bringing in an external HVAC technician, you can keep that repair in house, keeping costs low. Whereas before that talented HVAC technician may not have been on your roster due to their inability to speak English, real-time translation in platforms like the Maintenance App make having them as a full time member of the team possible.
Looking to the Future of Maintenance Operations
Maintenance has always been a multilingual function—the tools we use to support people who don’t speak English just haven’t caught up to where they need to be. Today, AI-powered real-time translation is already breaking down barriers to entry that have limited the size of the labor pool. Stay tuned as more and more multifamily operators embrace technology that supports the humans behind property management, increasing workforce access and improving quality of life for both residents and maintenance technicians around the country.