Create a great place to work

We benefit from the legacy of two strong organisations and are investing in our colleagues to ensure everyone can thrive at work. As part of this, we’re modernising the way we work, improving our offices to be more inclusive, and supporting our colleagues’ professional and personal development.

We’re focusing on creating one joint way of working, streamlining our services to offer a one-stop-shop for learning and development and introducing one finance and HR system. We’re already a strong, united organisation and steadily working our way towards becoming one charitable Registered Provider in June 2021.

Before the pandemic began, we were reviewing how and where we work. We carried out audits of all our offices and asked colleagues what they wanted from their place of work. This meant when lockdown started, we were in a good place to think about agile working.

The impact of lockdown saw us accelerate what we’d already started; modernising our offices and rethinking where we work. We adopted a ‘work anywhere’ approach and provided our colleagues with the right equipment and IT to embrace it.

Everything we do to make our organisation a great place to work is done in collaboration with our colleagues. We’ve been consulting on various projects, including our new terms and conditions. Before making this change to bring everyone together on the same guiding principles and contracts, we ran a 60-day consultation, ensuring we heard the views of our colleagues. Our staff forum, ConneXus, played a key role in this, connecting the organisation and creating important conversations during a time of change.

The health and wellbeing, coupled with development, of our colleagues is essential. When our people feel well and happy at work, they’re better able to do their job and support our customers. And when we invest in their development, the whole organisation benefits.

We’re all about professionalising our people, too. We’ve become early adopters of the Chartered Institute of Housing’s Professional Standards framework. This is a great way for us to work as one, united sector and the standard puts emphasis on the broad nature of housing. Alongside this we continue to offer apprenticeships to colleagues at any stage of their career, and currently benefit from 62 apprentices, 64% of which are among existing colleagues looking to attain new qualifications.