How to Speak Maintenance - What Good Work Actually Means

How to Speak Maintenance: What Good Work Actually Means

Guest: Christopher Faddoul with LUMA Residential

Most teams struggle because no one has clearly defined the standard.

What this month hits:

• Why “good job” means something different to everyone
• The danger of unclear expectations
• How inconsistency shows up across techs and teams
• Why standards matter more than speed

The Shift:

 Stop assuming people know what “good” is
 Start defining it clearly and consistently

Practical Takeaway:

• Every task should answer:
  “What does done correctly look like?”
  (Not just “is it done?”)

What really makes a great onsite team? Strong communication and a deep appreciation for maintenance professionals.

Each month, host Jason Fein, SVP of Maintenance at Windsor Communities teams up with TAA Education Foundation’s Becca Ramati to chat with industry guests about the critical role maintenance teams play in our communities. Together, they explore real-world topics that strengthen onsite collaboration, improve communication, and elevate the overall resident experience.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining. Another episode of How to Speak Maintenance. My name is Jason Fine. I'm the Senior Vice President of Maintenance at Windsor Communities. And with me is Becca Ramati, who's the VP of the TAAEF Education Foundation. Welcome, Becca.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hi, Jason.

SPEAKER_03 0:20

Today we have a special guest on with us, Chris Fadul with Luma Residential. Thanks for joining, Chris. Thank you for having me, guys. Yeah, do you mind telling our audience about yourself and how long you've been in the industry?

SPEAKER_01 0:34

I've been in the industry for over 20 years. Started with dad and just started my own business and just became back to maintenance and um started as a make ready with Luma Residential and then became a service tech. And uh year and a half after that, I became a service manager, and I am now I've just been promoted to a maintenance, uh regional maintenance supervisor. Uh been with the company six years, been in Texas for six years. Um so this is um my first and hopefully last company I'm gonna be working with. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_03 1:10

Congratulations on your promotion. That's a thank you. Thank you. Very impressive career, and and to be moving from you know, being uh on site as a maintenance tech all the way up to regional maintenance, and and it that's very impressive. But with 30 properties as well. So your job is we have about 30 properties. That's amazing. Well, last month uh we spoke about what unskilled might be like, what we might view unskilled labor as. It might be somebody that's a little slower, or it might, but it might not even be that they're unskilled. It might just be that we we just uh have unrealistic expectations or communication might be off. I was really excited to kind of move into this topic, which is what is a what is good work look like and how do we define it? So um first off, I'd like to say when I say good work, what it what's the first thing that comes to your mind, Chris?

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Quality, quality, quality work. Um nothing um really gets me is is when we have to go back to uh, you know, we close the work, we finish a work order out, residents uh okay, thank you very much, and then you you come back the next day, and that work order uh gets uh resubmitted um as um uh this wasn't fixed.

SPEAKER_03 2:31

Have you ever seen it though, where you know a maintenance team is moving so fast and everybody thinks that they're doing a good job, but then the office maybe is is thinking that they aren't performing up to standards. Have you ever seen that before?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Of course, of course, because I was one of those guys. I was out there running tickets because I wanted to get them all done, and you know, you come you come to work and you got 30, 40 uh service requests on on your board, and you just that that's that you hyper focus and say, I'm gonna go get all these done, and you know, we're not all perfect. Um, you know, sometimes we do miss things. Um and there's times where um a resident will end up calling uh uh the office and say, you know, they didn't fix it, and we go back and it was fixed, but they there's it's an operator error. I mean, there's multiple reasons.

SPEAKER_03 3:24

Um at a proper community where there's uh 30 tickets in a week or 40 tickets in a week, uh, good work might seem might be speed, or at a property where it's a hundred units maybe, and they get 10 work orders a week, and maybe it's quite it's more quality, and maybe it's you know adding a little extra. Do you think that that's part of the issue? Is is that the definition of good work is different from you know maintenance tech to maintenance supervisor to leasing agent to community manager?

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Yes, of course, because um here's here's here's in reality, um the name of the game is is get these work orders down and and take have these residents taken care of. And when you let, you know, me as a as a well, when I was on the as a maintenance tech on site, uh my supervisor said I need you to knock all these things out. Well, this is what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go knock them out. Um but then I became a supervisor and I started assigning these to my techs. And it it's the guys that are also trying to uh uh you know, they're trying to show themselves. They want to go and get all that work done and say, look, I'm valuable. You guys are always valuable, but you know, I always say slow down. Let's think about it before we just jump in and say it's fixed and and you know, check every, you know, do do your diagnostics. Uh do um, you know, if you if you're not sure, call your supervisor, call me, call uh um, call uh um, you know, if if there's a uh an office question, if something if the if it's not on your labeled on your ticket and your office uh is is saying, well, you know, they they got called and they said, Can you do this too? You know, it's it's all communication.

SPEAKER_03 5:08

That's a good point. Yeah. I mean, there's so many things that we're touching in a day, right? You're you're you we're electricians, we're plumbers, we're carpenters, we're we wear so many different hats. And when you first join in the industry, I don't know about you, Chris, it was probably the same as it was for me, but you're you're really not taught the the right way to do something, to complete a project the right way the first time. You think that's part of the issue?

SPEAKER_01 5:35

That's a big part of the issue. I mean, still dealing with it, it's training. It's training. We expect uh some of these guys, yeah, they have some experience. Uh and you know, then I I've interviewed guys where they say uh they went to school for all this, but you know, you don't every AC is wired different. Every uh, you know, we got hot neutral ground. Sometimes you get to these uh these condensers and they're all red. So um training is is a big is a big uh is a big deal. Um and I I am now on on that's this side of the the the the maintenance side and and I do see it a lot, training. Um we expect these guys to just jump in and start knocking things out left and right, but we don't really know what do they know and they don't know.

SPEAKER_03 6:25

Right. And and as we were talking, we you might have a skilled technician who does things one way, and you have a brand new technician that is doing something completely different. And so we might look at the the skilled person that's been with the industry for 20 years and say, they're fantastic, they're they did a good job. Whereas now you're comparing it to the green technician that might not take the the same steps that the skilled person does as well, right? Like, for example, if I a sink basin, like the bottom the inside of the cabinet, you know, the skilled employee might cut out the wood and replace it all and have brand new wood, then caulk it and paint it, and it'll look like it's brand new, like it was never broken. Whereas the the unskilled new person might sand it down and put some kills on it and paint it white. And you know, who's right? You know, these these are used apartments. I mean, the guy that the employee that spent the time and cut the basin out and put in new wood, everybody of course is gonna want that, but the other guy, the other person did a good job as well. I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Uh yeah, well, I mean, to me coming from my dad, I worked with my dad and he taught me a lot of things, and then I went off on my own and started my own uh uh remodel and painting business, and I started learning uh off of other uh contractors, and I said, you know, and then I go back to my dad and I said I'm gonna do it like this. I said, Why? I taught you to do it like this. I said, but the results the same. So if the results are the same, have at it. I mean, if if if if if you're gonna get the same quality just in a faster, in a in a more uh efficient uh in a more efficient uh way, then I I say have at it. I mean, uh yes, uh the right way, the right way is cut it out, like you said, and and and replace, but if it doesn't need to be replaced, and you could caulk it and and and sand it and paint it and make it look new again, and that's half the time of what the skilled guy did, then why not? Oh, Jerry. Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

I was just gonna say in this case, there's a couple things. One is, you know, what is the right answer is a question, and someone has to give that answer and set that standard and that expectation. And then another thing is just a plug for those new to the industry or new to this um these job types is like sometimes you can you you don't get the bad habits with someone new. So always a plug to give people a chance to learn. And if the training is available to them like you're making it, Chris, then you know that can be a really great, um, a great new employee who who doesn't have those bad habits.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Yeah, and and hey, I I learn something new every day. I never uh I mean, if you could show if Jason, you could show me a different way that's more efficient, that could give me that same result, teach me, please. Yeah. So uh um so if I if I take a guy that's not skilled, one of my new guys, and he shows me something new, I'm gonna learn from it. I'm I'll take I'll take that and and I'll run with that too. You know, more efficient and then less time, that means you can get more work done in another uh unit or uh another couple work orders.

SPEAKER_03 9:36

Yeah. Well, I don't think everybody had the same upbringing, probably as you, right, Chris? Where you had a you had a parent that sat you down and said you're gonna do it right the first time. And yeah, you were defined what right looks like. You were given the definition at a young age, so then that way it it it took you into your adulthood and to your career where you can be able to continue that. And that that's probably what's helped you elevate your career and be able to show people that you you hold yourself to a higher standard. So, but how do we get to that? How do we get that standard to our team? Sometimes we hire a maintenance employee and we say, Oh my gosh, I'm so glad that we have somebody now. We're behind on work orders. Go, you know, so how do we how do we take that person and give them a couple weeks to be able to say, here we pride ourselves on quality? If you're gonna caulk a toilet, uh, I don't want like another layer on top of the original toilet. And I don't want it to look like you took your thumb and used your thumb to rub, you know, the cock. So right, so that's my point. Like, how do you how do you break past that and give this employee the the definition of what good work looks like?

SPEAKER_01 10:46

It's uh you know that's a good question, Jason. It's it's it's it's uh it's something that I'm still um trying to master uh today. Um I I think we need to uh our new maintenance guys across the whole industry need um time training. And um what I've seen in this industry is us as uh leaders and supervisors, we get a little too busy and we don't have the exact uh the amount of time to train uh these guys the way they should. I mean, I just being just being straight honest. I mean, two weeks is not enough time to teach somebody uh you know, oh yeah, I can go spend a week with you here and a week with you there, and you know, and God knows what happens if I don't get to see you in between those weeks, and and now this guy forgot everything that I just taught him the week before. And uh so it it's it's it's it's training, man. It's it's really it's training and it's it it's it's it's not only a maintenance, I mean it's just life. Life, we're busy. Life's busy, life takes a lot from us, and we only get eight hours of the day at work to do a million things um on top of training people. And uh something that I I am working on uh as a personal goal is uh spend more time with with guys. Um because I you know I know some of these a lot of these guys are are my guys are are um they're good guys, they're hard workers, they just don't have uh they don't have the right direction yet. Right. I need more time to do that. That's that's what that's one.

SPEAKER_03 12:32

I think that it's giving your new employee grace, understanding that in the first three months, you're learning each other. You have to you have to learn each other, you have to see what their true skill levels are at. I I've hired a lot of maintenance employees in in the interview, right? They they sell themselves. I'm great at plumbing, electrical, I'm great at HVAC, I'm universally certified. How many employees have you have you met that are I'm universally certified, but then you get them behind a heat pump, but they don't know what the wires do and they don't know what goes to what? And that's not their fault. It's that they're trying to move up as fast as possible and grow. So it's important that we give the maintenance employees grace and we define what good looks like. What does good work look like? And that's that's the key to it all. And that's the whole conversation we're trying to have here is is like from the maintenance supervisor. I think we've hit on that, is you know, making sure that we're communicating with our maintenance employees and and giving them the tools and the training that they need. If I'm a manager listening to how to speak maintenance right now, how do I how do I get connected with my maintenance employees and make sure that what I think is good work is being communicated as well? What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Meetings. Meetings, uh staff meetings, one-on-one meetings. Um, I like to I I I when I was on site, I like to meet with my property manager every morning and what's going on and what's emergencies, and what what uh what can that property manager help me with, or what can I help that property manager with? Or does um and then um you know then I have a meeting with my maintenance staff. Um this is what we're gonna do today. We got some projects. If we have time for projects, uh if not, we're gonna bang out these uh these service requests. Um then my make ready crew, uh, we're gonna go walk this unit together, we're gonna get a list of what needs to be done, and um that's in a perfect world, Jason. Like, you know, we're busy too, like I said, it's time. Uh I could sit there and and and and give them all the instructions in the world, and they get to that unit and they're like, dang, what did he say again? So um uh I like to be very specific um and and and and have my uh morning meetings, and then after you know, 4 45, 15 minutes before we're done, um what did you guys accomplish today? What did you have problems with? If you know I gave you eight work orders and you come back with set uh six, what happened with these two? Well, I got stuck on those. Okay, so we'll put that for priority tomorrow and we'll work on that together.

SPEAKER_03 15:06

Yeah. Let me give you the hypothetical situation. It's not really hypothetical. I'm sure we've seen it a million times. Uh occupancy is down. Uh I'm the community manager, I have this community, and I've got five five people moving out tomorrow or next week, right? So I've got all these moveouts, I need to get them up and running as quickly as possible. I have a wait list of people that want to move into the property, but then I'm not communicating with my maintenance employees, right? So my maintenance team comes in and maybe they're being bonused off of their ticket, their ticket time, right? So how long does it take to complete a service request? So now if I'm not communicating with my maintenance team and I have a maintenance team that's uh highly motivated and compensated off of completing tickets as fast as possible, where do you think their time's gonna go? If they're if it's not communicated, hey, we need these turns done as quickly as possible, and we gotta make sure that they're done on time. What what do you think happens? Like, how do you think the good work uh turns there will be no good work?

SPEAKER_01 16:14

No, because now we're these guys are they're hitting the ground running, they want to go knock these tickets out. Hey, I actually need you to go and I just found out we have five moveouts, so uh, and we got move-ins right in the next not ten days, we got them in six days, so we guys gotta get in there and do those make readings. Well, now now they're gonna go and uh uh just throw everything together, and you're not gonna get quality work. They're gonna try, you know, because now we're in a in a rush, we're in a scramble. We gotta deal with vendors, painters, carpet cleaners, or carpet replacements, uh reef surface, and then the make ready on top of it, and they can't cross over each other. Some of my guys will work around some of our vendors, but and then and then here you go. Now then we get our uh inventory form when they move in, the residents move in, and it's an arm's length long because we missed all these things. And now that's another there's there goes some more service tickets that are gonna get added on there because now you gotta go back and get all that taken care of. Right. Um, it's it's not good for the company, it's not good for the resident, most importantly, and it's also not good for our our employees, our guys, because now we're stressing them out, and they think you know, I can't speak for them, but they could say, you know, I would be like, dang, I let this guy down, you know. Now I gotta go back. Oh, now I gotta see this resident that we was this resident was so happy to move into this beautiful community, and then they're gonna come to this apartment missing a doorknob, missing a blind, and it it's uh that it becomes a problem for everybody, everybody in in the whole circle.

SPEAKER_03 17:50

Definitely, and when you think about it, if we just would have sat down on a regular basis and communicated, I always say this on I've said this on multiple calls. Uh it's the same with my wife. If I don't, if I'm moving and doing my stuff and she's moving and doing her stuff, they're coming to the point where all of a sudden it's this moment where we realize that we're not connected, we're not, we're not moving together as a family. It's the same thing at work, it's exactly the same thing. If I'm coming to work and I'm highly motivated to complete my service requests within 48 hours, and I'm moving in that direction, and the community manager's under the gun to get some units occupied as quickly as possible, I'm I might not hit the mark. And then if I find out that I'm not hitting the mark, now it's speed. Now all of a sudden I'm rushing to try to get this stuff done as quickly as possible so that way we can get our occupancy up. And then, like you said, all of a sudden we've got quality issues. So it all adds up to this term that we say, well, they didn't do a good job. Well, I don't think we did a good job communicating in the beginning. I think uh as we were talking beforehand, I always found it important. I would come in the morning at eight and I would take my team and I would get them moving, and I would go check the property, and then I grab some coffee and I go sit down with my manager. We close the door and we'd sit down every single morning for 20 minutes just to make sure, hey, this is what we got done yesterday, this is where we're moving, this is our goal for the end of the end of the day Friday. So I love I love that you're you're talking about communication. And have you had a property where you know you saw just the manager and the maintenance supervisor were just clicking?

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Yeah, I I worked on a couple properties where me and my uh you know, me and my managers, we were uh, you know, it it if I forgot something, my manager picked it up. If my manager forgot something, I picked it up and we just flowed. And when you got no community, when there's a uh miscommunication or no communication, uh things will get s go south really fast.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Yeah, and then it then it becomes a retention issue because then you have unhappy employees who are getting burnt out, getting frustrated, and then you're stuck looking for someone new. And that's just about the words.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Then you gotta start all over again, right? Now we gotta pray we get the guy that wants to learn, or is trainable or not trainable, or um or or yeah, it's just it becomes a it just everything gets scrambled.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

And taking a moment, right? Taking a moment.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

And then it's very hard. Once everything is scrambled, everything gets hard uh to uh put back together because now you have this new workload when you're trying to fix the old workload and it stresses everybody out. Office, residents, employees, everybody. Everybody gets stressed out.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

Well, and in this world right now that we're living in, where it's hard to find qualified great maintenance employees, it's everybody's going through the same struggle because we're all trying to retain the great maintenance employees that we've trained over the years and that are invested in. So we want to pour into them. So it's important that you're you're trying to build a culture and an environment in each one of your communities where people want to work and they want to thrive and and they don't want to feel like they're under the gun all the time. So it's it's really important that we uh we try to figure that out. Coming to work to a fire drill every single day is not gonna work out.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

I agree, I agree. Uh there's some guys, I mean I'm I work great under pressure, I work the best under pressure, but then there's some guys who are like, uh, I need a day off, or I'm calling I'm sick tomorrow. And that's that's a problem.

unknown 21:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:26

Hey, if you want to do a shout out to that manager you were working working well with together, you wanna you want to give them a shout out?

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Um, it was Sarah McClendon. I worked really well. She was my first manager, and that's where I actually I grew. Uh I start she they hired me as a make ready, and then I became a service tech, and then I uh uh became a service manager, and after that my career took off. I finished at that property and went to another property, and then three properties later I'm here. I'm sure at the beginning it was a little rocky though, right? Like you were just hearing each other. Out. Yeah, and also, you know, I came from California. I had my own business. I was doing remote. I was getting California pay, right? I didn't know nothing about Texas. Moved to Texas, my whole family, and didn't know the cost of living was cheap. And they go and they offered me about 14 bucks an hour. I said cheap. Crazy. You know, uh, like and they're like, well, no, you have to then I started learning that you know, rental did we get a rental discount and all kind of added up. But yeah, we worked uh we worked fantastic together.

SPEAKER_03 22:29

That's good. How much just for fun? How many months did it do you feel like it took for you to like really start to click with Sarah?

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Um probably first month or two when she started seeing my make readies because I was like, these are you know, I was doing remodels, framing, and doing tile, and I was like, oh, I was like, this piece of case, I was knocking out make radies left and right. I knew I was very I'm very attention. I'm very detailed attentive attentive. So she would come in to do her final, like walk, you know, my after in, like, I don't see nothing missed here. Yeah. I was like, well, we have a check. They give us a checklist, and I'll fill out the checklist. And yeah, oh, you know, then then I started not liking the way the painters did it, so I would start painting the units myself. And uh, so now we were saving money for the painter with the painting with the contractors, too. So um, but then they weren't paying me for the painting, so I just stopped doing that. I'm just joking.

SPEAKER_03 23:26

Uh you can see the good work was defined between you and Sarah over a period of time. It wasn't just uh intrinsically built day one, it wasn't their day one. It took time for you to feel out Sarah and for Sarah to figure you out, and for both of you guys to understand exactly what you were capable of, what you would do, what you wouldn't do, and what the expectations were for the team, right?

SPEAKER_02 23:50

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

I worked with uh John our last uh uh last time I was with you guys, John Sanchez. He was my uh property manager at Brazil's, and uh we worked great together. You know, he he he actually came out and helped me pressure wash, like he was a very hands-on uh manager, and more of that, uh but but you know, if you know I'm not knocking on all managers, but a lot of managers get complacent in their office. They need to come out on their property and see uh what we do too. And uh, if we miss something, like like I said, if I forget something, the property manager could say, Hey, I I saw this. Oh dang, I didn't see that, so let me go take care of that, and vice versa.

SPEAKER_03 24:33

Would you say you wish that your manager knew how to speak maintenance, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Yes. Some do, some of them do, some of them do, there's there's some do, some do, and then some don't. And yeah, it gets frustrating on the maintenance side and the office side when it's just a disconnect right there.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

We basically need to speak. We need to speak and communicate. Communicate. Yeah, it's mate, speaking maintenance, it's speaking management, it's speaking period, so that people are communicating and understand the expectations that people have for them. So it's clear and it's concise and they know what there is expected. It's just pretty simple. We've talked about it in a million different ways, but it feels like that message is hard for people to stop and take that breath to be able to sort of have I communicated this properly? Does my team understand what's needed or expected of them?

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Also, I mean, residents, they need they could when they speak and they communicate, we know what you need. Now we know what we could do to fix it. It's like, oh no, I need you to change the uh one thing, and I'll say that in the description. I'm like, okay, what thing? It's all communication, Doctor. Communication. Agreed.

SPEAKER_03 25:52

Well, Chris, I'm gonna ask you a question before we wrap things up. Yes, sir. Uh, you've got a very long career, you've you've been in the industry a long time. Do you mind giving a tip or a trick to somebody that is looking to get into the maintenance industry or is new to the maintenance industry? And you know what what can they do to further their career in the maintenance industry?

SPEAKER_01 26:15

Work hard, uh want to learn, want to be, be a go-getter. Be a go-getter. Um, I'm hungry, man. I still like you know, I'm happy with my promotion, but I want more in my life. I want I want more. So um I started as a maintenance tech and climbed up in six years with this company. Um, and I I I just work hard, man, work hard and want to learn. If you don't, if if you you know, I I I I do say this to some guys that I do try to train and they don't want to, you know, maybe this job's not for you. No hard feelings. You know, don't come to work because this is all I could get, you know. No, you you your work's work. But come to work and you know, I I I enjoy coming to work. I enjoy coming to work. Um midday, I'm probably like, God, I want to go home, but uh but yeah, just uh if you want it, just go get it. Just work for it. Work for it. And and if someone's out there, there's a manager out there or a or a service uh lead that wants to train you everything he knows, uh soak it in. Take it in and and and listen and learn, and and and you'll be fine. You'll do great.

SPEAKER_03 27:26

What part of property management excites you? You you said you you come to work and you're excited to be here. Like what the I mean, because sometimes our job is like the lost baggage desk at the airport.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

I mean, it's like me is uh making people happy, you know, getting stuff taken care of. Uh uh that's going for my my bosses, my employees, my residents. Um I had a part of take changing your day, fixing your AC, or or training one of my guys, and they got they they took the knowledge and went with it, and or or taking up something off the plate off my my manager, or or or uh that that's what that's what that's my enjoyment.

SPEAKER_03 28:09

That's great. Yeah. Well, Chris, thank you very much for joining our call again. You're a repeat uh repeat offender, yes. Thank you very much for taking time out of your busy day. I know you got a lot of work to do. So uh Becca, did was there any questions or anything in the chat? Uh oh, you're muted.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Uh no, not today, but thank you, Chris, so much. Thank you, Jason. We'll be back next month on July 22nd, the fourth Wednesday of the month, for how to speak maintenance. So thanks.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Thanks for having me, guys. Thank you.