Use a Facebook Group to Manage Your Team of Pet Sitters
Improve communication across the team with this useful tool
If like me, you have a large number of people on your pet sitting team, sometimes you feel out of touch with them. This is especially true if you have a manager in between you and the rest of the team.
At Pet Nanny of the Main Line we have a large team of 40 sitters, they are out working every day and I have very little communication with them on a day-to-day basis.
But it’s important that we keep a connection with our staff so that everyone is working from the same page and understands the company’s expectations. Even our best sitters sometimes make mistakes and need a gentle reminder of our specific policies for providing exceptional service to our clients.
One way we improved communication across the whole team was to create a private Facebook group just for our pet sitters. If you are looking for tools to manage your team of pet sitters, I recommend this free option.
If you are a member of my free Facebook group Pet Nanny Coach Community, you’ll see that I post a tip of the day.
It’s popular with the members and I decided to set up a similar resource for my pets sitters.
It’s a series of gentle little reminders about what to do when working for our clients.
Such as, don’t forget to check the key when you are at a registration meeting. Make sure that your first contact with a client is always via phone, not text messaging.
Check that all the doors are locked when you leave the house. Make sure that you rinse the dog bowls or cat bowls on your final visit. Don’t forget to wipe the counters.
Celebrate the small and big wins together
Another function of the Facebook group is to create a community and try to bring us all together.
When we work remotely rather than in a regular office, this virtual space is where we get to know each other and share common issues, as well as celebrate successes.
We have theme days such as “Favorite Pet Friday and we also have team meetings within the group using Facebook lives and chat.
When we want to praise a sitter who has gone above and beyond for our clients we celebrate them as “Sitter of the Month, and it inspires and encourages everyone.
It’s also a great way to quickly reach a group of pet sitters in one go. At times when we’ve needed an urgent pet visit and putting a message in the group helped identify a sitter who could respond immediately.
So, my tip for you today is Facebook groups is a great tool to manage your team of pet sitters. They’re free, you can set reminders, run meetings and communicate face-to-face using lives and group chat.
