Environmental, social and governance. These are the three sustainability factors that all companies and organisations have to be responsible for. They are a form of investment in the sustainability of the organisation.
Environmental conditions to consider can be environmental pollution and recycling. The social factor refers to conditions and health and safety conditions, and so on. Governance refers to the state of management including the independence and objectivity of supervisory entities, a system of checks and balances, and more. ESG describes these three factors and their roles in organisational operations.
For decades now, there has been a call for greater environmental consciousness and sustainable practice. In recent years, these have become even more important factors for tenants.
Tenants prioritise green and sustainable rental spaces. They want to know more about how their spaces impacts the environment. This includes various conditions like:
- the proof of building health
- evidence of eco-friendly facilities, and
- the property managers’ focus on a low environmental footprint.
Tenant involvement strategies play an important role in implementing ESG and running a more sustainable facility. Outdated facility management and tenant involvement approaches usually have one-sided communication from the landlord or manager to the tenants. But, ESG-focused tenant involvement requires the tenants to actually get involved.
As a property manager, you cannot introduce or effectively implement changes without the input of your tenants. Your tenants need to remain informed and involved, yes. But, you need to collaborate with them, as well.
For example, if you’re going to implement an electricity rebate for tenants that have a low electricity consumption, you need to be able to monitor the consumption and communicate with tenants through this process. This initiative is also likely to fail if your tenants don’t have a clue what the best ways to conserve electricity are.
How To Get Tenants Involved
So, with the influence of ESG trends, you want to develop a sense of community and reciprocation between you and your tenants. Practical methods for doing this include:
- Conducting feedback surveys after tenant involvement or tenant engagement activities
- Setting up a tenant communication channel for complaints, issues, comments, feedback, service requests and more.
- Educating your tenants on sustainability strategies
- Providing incentives like rebates
- Hosting occasional tenant representatives meetings or focus groups
- Using the tenant communication channel announcements to keep tenants in the loop
These methods engage your tenants in ESG trend implementation. Through these techniques, you can address the environmental and social conditions of your rental facility. You can also learn how to improve your governance and management.
Final thoughts
Tenant involvement might not be a challenge in the initial stages. However, it can be difficult to sustain tenant engagement in the long run.
Using a virtual tenant communication platform for tenant involvement can help you manage interactions. It will also enable you to easily keep your tenants informed of any updates to the property. That way, you can ensure the success of your sustainability strategies and lead your tenants in greener environments.
Are you looking for a tool to improve tenant involvement as well as other property and facility processes in your organisation? Falcony | Observe ticks all the boxes for low-threshold reporting, analytics and follow-up actions. Is easy to customise, enables real dialogue and is a lot more.
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
