COLLEAGUE COMMUNICATION

Colleagues told us that they didn’t get regular updates on what was going on, and didn’t know how to share their views, so we now have regular face to face meetings in the form of Let’s Connect and all colleague conferences, have monthly updates on email (your News) and video updates

(Friday takeaways) on Workplace We created the employee forum and Hive feedback surveys to listen to what you have to say.

Friday Take-Away

People Support

We have a new people support team, with a system in place that helps us respond and support you, our colleagues, more effectively.

Reporting Accidents

We’ve improved our accident, incident and near miss reporting by introducing an electronic system. We can now see trends quickly and work with departments to help reduce the risks to colleagues.

Launch Of Inconnect

Monthly Pay

We listened and took action to address the feedback from colleagues that they wanted to be paid monthly rather than every 4 weeks, so we gave all existing colleagues a choice.

Colleagues were finding it difficult to find documents and helpful information needed to do perform

4 weeks Monthly

Being a high performing, financially confident and well-governed

Retained V1 Rating

We retained our V1 (financial viability) rating with the regulator. This gives assurance to customers, colleagues, board and wider stakeholders that we are managing our finances and are well prepared to respond to changes in the future.

This is a great achievement, recognising the hard work of colleagues across the business. V1

IN DEPTH ASSESSMENT (IDA)

G1

July –Sept IDA

We’ve been working hard on embedding our governance improvements with the aim of achieving a G1 rating at our next In Depth Assessment (IDA) in Q2 (July – Sept) of this year.

GOVERNANCE AND REGULATORY IMPROVEMENT PLAN (GRIP)

We have a detailed Governance and Regulatory Improvement Plan (GRIP) in place which is overseen by our Board and have undertaken a readiness review with external partners to make sure we are well prepared for the Regulator.

6 Key Themes in our GRIP

Strengthen our risk management and control framework

Improve oversight and governance arrangements

Improve data quality and reliability across key data sets

Rent and service charges compliance

Homes England audit and accountability compliance

Landlord Health and Safety compliance and good practice

Budgets

We took a new approach to budgets for 23/24, which were built from the ground up instead of being based on previous years. Budget Heads and Directors were actively involved in budgeting to support the plans and priorities for their areas.

The Budgets and Business Plan have been approved by the Board to allow us to now deliver the priorities set out in our two-year plan.

Managing change

Our 2 Year Plan was an ambitious change agenda to deliver, and you told us that there was so much change happening it was hard to keep up. With the help of our business change team, we’ve now got clear sight of all the activity and are taking a planned approach to when things will be happening, making sure that the right people are involved from the start.

We’re also working hard to balance the changes we need to make in the longer term with the need to keep day to day services and operations running.

We know that our approach might not be perfect, but we’re working hard to make the changes we need to make happen and to make sure you are involved at the right time. We’ve looked at what we need to deliver in year two we’ll be updating you on that soon!

next…

As we look to the year ahead, the outcome of our IDA and making progress with our governance improvements is important, so we need to continue working hard to show that we are a well governed organisation. We’ll be embedding and further strengthening our governance framework and managing risk more effectively.

At the core of our improvements in year 2 is putting our customers central to everything we do, and we’ll start to deliver our Customer Voice Strategy and many more customers will be getting involved in shaping decisions. We’ll continue to work on our Neighbourhood plans and take a more local approach.

Also, in the year ahead will be a focus on performance and addressing underperformance. We’ll be looking at some initial and urgent system improvements and working on improving the quality of our data and reporting. We’ll be doing a lot of work on creating a great culture and looking at our leadership and management capabilities to ensure we “live it”.

More on all of this to follow!

What’s Customer Voice Strategy Year 2 update