Any relationship is a two-way street. It requires time and effort from both parties. While it’s hard work to keep these strong relationships up, the result is often invaluable. Whether in business or personal life, relationships are something that we need. Especially when it comes to commercial landlords or property managers and tenants.
However it is easy for these relationships to get focused on dealing with issues in cooling, heating or other concerns vs creating relationship building opportunities.
Green teams are one way that this is possible. While bringing tenants together to process sustainability goals can seem like a daunting task. It’s actually a really great way to create a two-way conversation between landlords and various tenant and occupant groups.
It’s common for property management companies to host events like BBQ’s, Ice Cream days or other fantastic initiatives to show appreciation to all occupants. Where Property Manager’s can take their engagement with tenants further, is through Sustainability related initiatives. The Harvard Business Review details how sustainability matters in the battle for talent – and as that battle turns into a full out war on talent – little efforts on sustainability go a long way.
If you’re looking for inspiration on what you can do to work with your tenants in the race2reduce, we’ll be sharing initiatives you can undertake to engage with your tenants over the coming weeks and months.
First up: Artis REIT at the Concorde Corporate Centre have been engaging with their tenants using simple yet effectively efforts, from community clean up days (pictured above) to energy audit contests and earth week initiatives.
They also award tenants for participation in their energy audits and midnight walk-throughs and participation in efforts like the BOMA Toronto Earth Hour Challenge!
The great thing about efforts like tenant energy audits is that walking through a tenant space after hours allows you to determine opportunities for schedule adjustments that can create no-cost savings. The tenant is able to accrue savings by simply adjusting schedules when not in use.
To engage their tenants in the initiative, Artis celebrated their efforts by awarding their participating tenants. These types of efforts open the conversation up to changing schedules and begin to create a two-way conversation where landlords can then suggest the improvements to tenants. Showing them the results may be the motivator that they need.
A great example of the savings that can be achieved through these programs comes from an Energy@Work case study, where tenant schedules were changed over the Labour Day long weekend. With everyone out of the office, this was the perfect time to test a new weekend schedule at the approx. 1 million square foot building. The results were a 10% daily savings. Because it didn’t impact tenants, the dynamic scheduling was implemented year round!
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