New condo board members often face an uphill battle learning the ropes and understanding their directive. As volunteers they bring varying skills to the board, which makes getting them up to speed a challenge. To help in the onboarding process, here we share our top tips for new condo board members’ success. 

Develop an Onboarding Process

Your onboarding process should include perspectives from current board members, property management, and HR professionals to ensure you empower new board members to succeed. However, enlisting past board members to share their experience and feedback provides insights into the most crucial knowledge that helps create effective directors. 

Your process should reflect your mission and values to ensure each board member is committed to achieving specific goals. Defining these goals will vary as there will be changing initiatives such as scope of reserve fund study projects, changing financial situations, trends, etc. Therefore, you will have a set process, but will adapt each board member’s initiatives to ensure they are relevant. 

Hold a 3 Month Review

The three-month review gathers feedback from new board members regarding gaps in your onboarding process while issues are fresh in their mind. You want a true picture of their struggles so you can make improvements right away. The review should discuss:

• Effective and ineffective onboarding steps
• Challenges they’ve encountered in their duties they weren’t prepared to handle
• Recommendations for improvements
• Challenges preventing them from achieving their goals

The objective is to identify opportunities to continuously improve your onboarding process, so each new director faces fewer challenges. 

Assign an Individual to Manage Onboarding 

Having an individual assigned to manage onboarding will ensure the process is followed and proper training and associated activities are carried out. This is often the ideal role for your property management company, as they are familiar with building operations, current and upcoming projects, the condo act as well as your condo corporation’s policies. They will also have access to HR specialists who can help streamline the process using their expertise in coaching. 

A single contact dedicates time for training in the specific roles, responsibilities, and duties of a director. Senior director or retired director mentorship also shares legacy information about the community, building operations and lessons learned for a more robust, personalized approach. 

Create an Onboarding Manual 

An onboarding manual provides all the information a board member needs to get up to speed. It also provides an easy reference for the following:

• An overview of condo governance
• Specifics related to day-to-day operations and their contribution 
• The director’s responsibilities to the community
• Overview of financial health
• Highlights from the latest reserve fund study (you can also provide the complete study, but the overview makes it easier to digest)
• Instructions on apps and software walking them through the most common steps needed to perform their duties 

Your property manager can create your manual, keep it up to date and provide relevant resources to help reduce friction as directors step into their roles.   

Enlist Committee Members

Community committee members are excellent resources for insights on the lay of the land. They have invaluable experience serving the community and can offer culturally appropriate tips to make communicating and working within the community easier. They can also provide connections with key players in the community and update new board members on project progress.

An onboarding process allows new board members to start contributing in a meaningful way, effectively creating a stronger board that gets things done. The better your onboarding process, the stronger and more effective your board becomes. 

CPO Management Inc., a property management company in Toronto and the GTA specializing in condo corporations helps condo boards optimize performance and build a better condo community. Reach out to us today to learn more about our condo services.