Paying Your People Is the Easy Bit

There was a moment in my recent Viking Chats conversation with Heather that stayed with me long after we'd finished recording. During 18 months of treatment for cancer, work remained part of her life. Not because an employer was demanding that she carry on regardless, and certainly not because she had anything to prove, but because she wanted it there. At a time when so much of her normal life had been turned upside down, work offered some normality, familiarity and a connection with the person she had been before cancer suddenly became such a huge part of her world.

What struck me just as much was the way her employer approached it. The answer wasn't simply to sign Heather off, wish her well and tell her to come back when it was all over. Nor was there an expectation that she somehow battle through and carry on as normal. She was given the flexibility to work when she could and step away when she couldn't. Most importantly, the support was shaped around what Heather actually needed rather than somebody else's assumption of what a person going through cancer treatment ought to need.

It's an extreme example, of course, but it made me think about what being a good employer actually means today. We talk much more openly about wellbeing, mental health, flexibility and work-life balance than we did twenty years ago, and that's undoubtedly progress. At the same time, running a business and supporting the collection of very different human beings within it has arguably become more complicated. People have different needs, different pressures outside work and different ideas about the role they want their employer to play in their lives. A policy can provide a framework, but it can't tell you what the person sitting opposite you actually needs.

At The Depositary, we've always believed that businesses should try to make things easier, faster and better. Usually when we talk about that, we're discussing operations, technology or the experience of landlords and tenants. But there's another beneficiary of better operations that doesn't get talked about nearly enough: the people working inside the business.

Paying someone is only the beginning

For all the discussion around employee benefits, wellbeing initiatives and company culture, the most fundamental obligation of an employer remains pretty straightforward. Somebody gives you their time, skills and expertise, and you pay them properly for it.

That's the easy bit.

The harder part comes when life doesn't behave itself.

People get ill. Parents become ill. Relationships break down. Children need support. Bereavements happen. Mental health can suffer. Somebody who has always been extraordinarily capable suddenly finds themselves struggling to deal with things that six months earlier wouldn't have fazed them. Sometimes there isn't even a dramatic event you can point towards; a person simply runs out of road after carrying too much for too long.

You can't write a policy capable of anticipating every version of that.

My own approach as an employer has generally started with two questions. The first is personal: if I found myself in this person's position, what would I hope somebody would do for me? It's a useful test because it introduces empathy before process. But there's a very important second question, because what I'd want and what somebody else wants may be completely different: what help do you actually want and need from us?

Heather's experience illustrates why that distinction matters. An employer could quite reasonably have looked at what she was going through and decided that the compassionate response was to remove work from her life entirely. For somebody else, that might have been exactly right. For Heather, work was one of the things she wanted to retain. It wasn't simply employment; it gave her a degree of normality when normality was in desperately short supply.

Good support therefore isn't always about doing more for somebody. Sometimes it's about listening carefully enough to understand what they mean by support.

That creates challenges for employers, particularly smaller businesses. An agency with ten people doesn't have the same ability to absorb a long-term absence as a company employing ten thousand. When somebody drops out of a small team, their work doesn't disappear with them. Somebody else has to pick it up, and if that isn't handled carefully, an attempt to support one colleague can inadvertently overload three others.

That's why I think the conversation about wellbeing needs to extend beyond HR and into the way we design our businesses in the first place.

Capacity isn't a new problem

There's a tendency to talk about burnout and capacity as though they arrived with hybrid working, smartphones or Generation Z. I don't buy that. Driven people have probably always taken on more than they should. We're simply getting better at talking about it, although I'd argue we're still nowhere near good enough.

One of the things Heather talks about with striking openness is the version of herself that existed before her diagnosis. She was fiercely independent and accustomed to taking responsibility for things. Career, children, home, relationship and even household jobs could become things she felt she ought to handle. Looking back, she describes effectively creating a sense of claustrophobia for herself by taking so much on. Her experience forced her to become much more conscious of her limits and much more willing to let other people carry things.

You don't need to have experienced anything remotely comparable to recognise the behaviour.

Every agency has its "I've got it" people.

They're incredibly valuable. They're the ones who know where everything is, remember the odd detail about a landlord's portfolio, help the new starter when they're stuck and somehow find the answer when everybody else has drawn a blank. When something goes wrong, you give it to them because you know it'll get sorted.

The danger is that competence attracts workload.

Every time they cope, we give them something else to cope with. Because they don't complain, we assume they're fine. Because the work gets done, we assume the process works. Eventually you can have somebody operating beyond sensible capacity while the business congratulates itself on their productivity.

Learning to say no is an important skill, particularly for ambitious and driven people. But employers can't outsource all responsibility for capacity to the employee. If your business only discovers that somebody was overwhelmed when they finally tell you they can't do it anymore, there's probably something worth examining in the way the business operates too.

I've seen people achieve extraordinary things while destroying themselves in the process. At that point you have to question what has really been achieved. If hitting the target costs somebody their physical health, mental wellbeing, relationships or ultimately their career with you, the number on the spreadsheet starts to look considerably less impressive.

What has any of this got to do with PropTech?

Quite a lot, actually.

We have a habit in the property industry of talking about operational efficiency almost exclusively in financial terms. A piece of technology saves X hours, which means a business can manage Y more properties without recruiting another person. Automating a process reduces cost per tenancy. An integration eliminates duplication and therefore improves margin.

Those are all legitimate business cases, and we'd be lying if we pretended they didn't matter. Businesses have to make money.

But they're not the only return on investment.

Think about the average property manager's working day. How much of it requires the knowledge, judgement and empathy you hired that person for, and how much is spent chasing, copying, checking, reminding, rekeying and coordinating?

Those activities don't simply consume time. They consume capacity.

That distinction is important. Give somebody an hour back and you haven't necessarily created an hour in which you can squeeze another twenty tasks. You may have created an hour in which they can properly speak to a landlord who's worried, help a colleague who is struggling, deal thoughtfully with a difficult resident situation or simply finish the day feeling in control rather than completely drained.

There is value in that, even if it doesn't fit neatly into a cell on a spreadsheet.

This has been central to our thinking at The Depositary from the beginning. The tenancy conclusion process was identified by the team in our own letting agency as one of the most broken and time-consuming parts of their work. When we really examined it, an enormous amount of their effort wasn't being spent applying property-management expertise. It was administration surrounding the moments where that expertise was actually required.

Removing that work doesn't make the property manager less important. It allows them to spend more time being a property manager.

The same principle should apply across an agency. If software can reliably do something that doesn't benefit from human judgement, let it. If two systems can exchange information without somebody copying it between them, let them. If a customer can obtain a straightforward update instantly rather than waiting for an employee to read an email and type a response, why would we deliberately preserve the slower process?

That isn't about removing humanity from our businesses. It's about being much more selective about where we use it.

Building businesses that can carry people

Heather's story also raises a more uncomfortable operational question. What happens when one of your key people simply isn't there?

Hopefully the reason is something wonderful: maternity or paternity leave, a sabbatical, travelling, or somebody taking the holiday they've been promising themselves for five years. Sometimes the reason will be illness or something happening elsewhere in their life that requires their full attention.

Whatever the cause, a healthy business should be capable of carrying them for a while.

That doesn't mean nobody notices their absence. Good people should be missed. But there's a difference between missing someone's contribution and discovering that an entire part of your operation exists only inside their head.

When businesses rely heavily on manual processes and individual knowledge, supporting somebody through a difficult period becomes harder because their colleagues aren't only carrying the person's workload; they're trying to reconstruct how that workload gets done. Information is buried in inboxes. Processes vary depending on who's completing them. A landlord only ever speaks to one person. Somebody has a spreadsheet saved locally that nobody else knew existed.

Better systems, clearer processes and sensible automation create resilience. They give the business the ability to pick someone up and carry them when they need it without simply transferring an impossible burden onto everybody around them.

To me, that's part of being a good employer too.

It isn't as visible as sending flowers or introducing a wellbeing programme, and nobody is likely to write a glowing LinkedIn post about your workflow design. But if somebody's world falls apart on Tuesday and they're able to step away knowing their colleagues aren't going to drown because of it, you've created something genuinely supportive.

Equally, when they're ready to return, the business should be capable of meeting them where they are rather than demanding that they immediately become the person they were before.

One of the most interesting parts of Heather's conversation is her rejection of the simplistic idea of getting "back to normal". An experience that profound changes things. You learn things about yourself, your limits, your relationships and what you're prepared to tolerate. The objective isn't necessarily to reconstruct the old version of your life exactly as it was; sometimes you have to establish a new version that works better for the person you've become.

Employers need enough emotional intelligence to understand that too.

Easier, faster, better- for whom?

At The Depositary, our mantra is easier, faster, better. We talk about making tenancy conclusions easier for agents, getting money back to tenants faster and creating better outcomes for everybody involved.

But conversations like the one with Heather are a useful reminder that efficiency shouldn't only be measured at the end of a process.

It should be felt by the people delivering it.

The property industry is facing significant change, and there will inevitably be pressure to do more: more regulation to absorb, more expectations from customers, more competition, more data and more technology. The answer cannot simply be to keep loading those demands onto good people until we discover where their breaking point is.

Technology won't solve wellbeing. An integration can't make somebody a compassionate manager and AI won't magically create a good company culture. Those things still require leadership, judgement and a willingness to listen.

What technology and good operational design can do is remove some of the unnecessary weight. They can make businesses less dependent on heroic individual effort and give people more capacity for the parts of their work—and their lives—that genuinely require them.

Being a good employer today is challenging. It's also incredibly rewarding. When somebody is struggling, I think our responsibility goes further than continuing to pay them and pointing towards the relevant policy. We should try to understand what support looks like for that individual, give it where we reasonably can and build businesses robust enough to carry people when they need carrying.

Heather's experience is an extraordinary example, and my immediate reaction listening to her was that I'm not sure I would have been as brave. I suspect I would have crumbled, even knowing that crumbling wasn't really an option. But perhaps one of the most useful things we can take from her story isn't that everyone needs to become more resilient. It's almost the opposite.

None of us has unlimited capacity, however capable or driven we might be. Knowing where our limits are matters, and creating workplaces where people don't have to reach those limits before somebody notices matters too.

After all, there isn't much point building a brilliant business if we destroy good people in the process.