Thames Valley: Encore Academy helps gardens blossom
Communal garden landscaping at residential developments across the Thames Valley region has become more sophisticated in recent years, and property management company Encore is taking the lead in ensuring that its staff are knowledgeable and skilled enough to maintain and care for them to the standards that customers expect.
Encore is known for its industry-leading preference of employing multi-skilled caretakers and concierges at the residential developments it manages, who promise to look after each property as if they live there themselves.
But the increasing need for advanced gardening skills has meant that Encore’s facilities staff are now having their abilities strengthened by a new garden maintenance course, launched in February 2019 as part of the company’s Encore Academy in-house training programme.
Joaquim Fillola, managing director of Encore Estate Management, explained: “Property developers know how important first impressions are to their sales, and so they are creating increasingly sophisticated communal gardens and open spaces to make their developments stand out to buyers. These are likely to have more specialist and maintenance-heavy planting which require a much higher level of gardening skill to keep them looking beautiful than would have been the case in the past.”
The days when maintenance companies had to do little more than run a mower around and trim back the odd thorny hedge are long gone, added Fillola. “These days we are coping with the delicate maintenance of wildlife ponds and eco-friendly sustainable drainage systems, as well as specialist garden plants, natural screening and fruit-bearing hedges to attract birds. All these things mean we need caretakers with green fingers, as well as the multitude of other skills needed to successfully maintain a modern residential development.”
Encore has prepared its own extensive training resources for the garden maintenance course to ensure that staff who have responsibilities for gardening will have up-to-date, job specific information to help them in their work, whether that’s the maintenance of drainage swales or ensuring that pruning and other maintenance is done on a schedule that protects wildlife from disturbances.
“Caretaking and concierge roles for residential properties demand a wide range of skills,” said Fillola, “including impeccable customer service, practical property maintenance skills, cleaning knowledge and horticultural abilities; and it’s really hard to find all those skillsets in one individual. Our new garden maintenance course will make sure that our new recruits are up to speed on every aspect of managing a development, as well as consolidate the knowledge of those who are already doing the role with a formal programme that will help to develop their careers in the future.”
The new course is just one of a wide variety of training courses offered to its staff by the Encore Academy, which was initially set up to train those entering the industry as office-based property managers and accounts staff. In its first year, 2017, the Academy delivered 108 training sessions across all four Encore offices, amounting to 425 staff attendances in total. Additional training was provided to staff throughout 2018, with 86 separate training sessions and 361 staff attendances, as well as 25 new starters taken through the programme. The success of the Academy in terms of improved skills, job satisfaction and staff retention led to the decision to open it up to the facilities staff of front-line caretakers and concierges.
“As a company we are committed to offering our staff the chance to progress, and the Encore Academy ensures that those who join us will be learning new skills and having the best chance of promotion in the future,” stressed Fillola. “Estate management offers fantastic opportunities for the right candidates, and offering extensive training in-house allows us to recruit candidates with the aptitude and personality to succeed, while filling in any gaps in their knowledge.”
