’Tis the Season to...Evaluate Your Staff

When Bernie Greenwald began presiding over the board at Hudson Manor Terrace, a 210-unit co-op in Riverdale, more than two decades ago, holiday bonuses were handed out to the union staff without much thought. Over the years, he says, the bonus had become a kind of entitlement.

Greenwald and other board members began looking at it differently, however, arguing that staff should be evaluated every year. “Have there been many complaints against them?” he asked. “Have they done their job properly?” The Hudson Manor Terrace board decided it could use holiday bonuses to improve staff performance.

In most cases, Greenwald says, the board followed the citywide custom and gave out the usual bonus of one week’s pay (more for the super) – but with an added approximately 10 or 20 percent for employees perceived to have gone above and beyond the call of duty. But evidence of poor performance – failing to open the door for residents, rudeness, excessive phone use – could lead to a decrease in the bonus. “We tried to...make you earn [the bonus],” says Greenwald.

The Hudson Manor Terrace board, it turns out, is not alone in tying the size of the holiday bonus to the level of employee performance. “Fifteen years ago, boards gave the bonus routinely,” says A.J. Rexhepi, the director of operations at Century Management. “Today, I find more boards questioning the size of the bonus or even whether to give a bonus. People are more cognizant about rising salaries and rising costs and making sure that they’re getting the service that they pay for.”

Boards don’t necessarily conduct formal employee evaluations, but they generally want the bonus size to express the co-op’s level of appreciation for the employee’s service – or lack thereof. “We do see some people get very small holiday bonuses as a notification that [the board] is not happy with [their] performance,” says Steve Greenbaum, director of property management at Mark Greenberg Real Estate.

No matter how you use them – as entitlement or inducement – end-of-the-year bonuses for building staff are the norm in most co-ops and condos, as are the tips staff members typically receive from residents. They’re a proven booster of staff morale. But bonus amounts are not at all uniform, varying from building to building and board to board. A number of property managers make sure the board is aware of the building’s past practices. “We prepare bonus sheets for the board that have the name of each employee, their start date, weekly salary, and what their bonus was for the last two years,” Greenbaum says.

In the end, boards should realize that they will get more if they are fair. While she finds that most boards appreciate their supers, Dawn Dickstein, president of MD Squared Property Group, believes that management should be ready to educate those boards that might not be aware of how much the super saves them. She recalls a co-op board in Queens. While its building was not high-end, the board members gave their super a bonus of more than $20,000 because they recognized how much he had saved them by doing repair work that they might otherwise have had to hire outside contractors to do.

Concludes Greenbaum: “Boards want bonuses to come with a message – if somebody really did a good job, they need to be told they did a good job.”