View publication - Chartered Institute of Housing

PART TWO: LEADING TOMORROW
• Secondly, our communication needed to improve. We embraced customer friendly
writing and trained staff to think more about our audience and improve the
accessibility of written communication. This helped build better, more transparent
relationships with our residents.
• Finally, we delivered training and development opportunities aimed at developing the
whole person. This focused on positive thinking and overcoming self-limiting beliefs.
Confident, positive, staff, who take responsibility for their actions will always work
better with customers. It could be argued, then, that our approach starts with our
customers and works backwards.
The work stream with residents was about building structures and trust. We created our
co-regulatory resident governance structure in stages. A Resident Board Member
Steering Group was established first to design and implement the new framework. We
took every opportunity to work face-to-face with residents – and they certainly took the
time to tell us what was wrong. Gradually people believed our values of openness,
honesty and integrity. We established Local Area Panels (LAPs) for residents which
covered our areas of operation in London and Surrey, Sussex and Kent. These fed into a
Residents Council. Acutely aware of the role repairs played in the fortunes of customer
satisfaction, we also set up Repairs and Maintenance Panels (RAMPS) to scrutinise our
performance. Once the main structural elements of our resident governance were in
place, we undertook a major review to test its effectiveness. Any weaknesses were
identified and ironed out. And from now strong, structural foundations, we grew our
resident involvement strategy.
Our new resident involvement strategy gives people a menu of choices around how they
would like to be involved. But the involvement needs to be meaningful. This includes:
• Responsibility for identified budgets.
• Scrutiny of performance.
• Financial information and autonomy to shape local services.
As we move forward, our residents will be at the heart of our new leaning thinking
programme we’ve named WOW, or ‘Ways of Working’. Residents tell us what they
value. This helps us to map processes to enhance those things whilst throwing the rest
out. If it doesn’t matter to residents then ditch it.
The parallel processes with staff and residents, have now come together. Under our
‘One Team’ approach, we held joint sessions for staff, residents and Board members to
100