A vibrant culture that supports and attracts the best people

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As a housing association and not-for-profit business, we can truly say that people, not profit are our driver and reason for being. Our vision, “More homes, bright futures”, is focused on creating safe, secure homes and communities, laying the foundations for people to thrive, and creating bright futures for all. Our values, created to support this, are to work as one team, encourage challenge and change, and deliver a great customer experience.

We’ve established the business as an enjoyable and vibrant organisation to work for, where people can achieve their best and can see how their roles contribute to the bigger picture. The nature of our business means we have a strong social purpose, and our staff feel their job gives them a strong sense of helping to make a difference to society whether they are in a customer-facing position or supporting function such as finance or IT.

Our first Best Companies employee engagement results recognise the strong position we’re in and provide us with the insight and knowledge that we have an excellent base to improve upon. According to Best Companies, this is a significant achievement that shows we’re taking workplace engagement seriously and signifies ‘very good’ levels of workplace engagement. These results show we’ve worked together well throughout the pandemic showing adaptability and resilience, and we’re pleased that our collective efforts to stay connected with each other have been recognised in this way.

An awardwinning culture

Our approach to employee wellbeing has been recognised by winning the CIPD People Management Awards for the best health and wellbeing initiative. The CIPD is the professional body for HR and people development in the UK. This award recognises the continuing journey we’re on and the fantastic role all our people have played in supporting each other and themselves in the workplace. Integral to our approach have been our Stigma Busters, a team of people from across the business who help remove the stigma of mental health by encouraging open conversations and sharing practical ideas and advice. They’ve continued their support remotely via our intranet and Yammer groups, and staff at all levels have written blogs about their experiences and situations during challenging times. In January this year we signed the Business in the Community Race at Work Charter. The signing is part of our ongoing commitment to promoting greater diversity and inclusion within the organisation. We’re taking practical steps to ensure our workplace is tackling barriers that people within ethnic minority groups face in recruitment. We know that ethnic minorities still face significant disparities in employment and progression and that’s something we need to change to ensure that our organisation is representative of British society today and the communities we serve. We’ll be reporting our progress back to Business in the Community in the coming months and look forward to continuing and prioritising our work in this area. Our latest Ethnicity Pay Report highlights our commitment to rewarding and paying our staff fairly and our aim to represent ethnicity at all levels across the business, in line with our customer base and local demography. It shows that we’ve made great progress over the last 2 years closing our ethnicity pay gap by 10 percentage points from 11.8% down to only 1.8%. We know we have more to do, like many in our industry, such as encouraging more women into traditionally male-oriented trades roles and we’ve been strengthening our links with local schools and colleges to highlight the benefits of these roles and offering a range of apprenticeships. On International Women’s Day we focused on some of the achievements of women within our own organisation and the way they’ve carved out their voices and careers.

Improving diversity and inclusion

Embedding a learning culture

We aim to provide a stimulating learning environment so our people can realise their potential and be the best they can be.

We’ve continued our leadership development programme called “From good to great” which focuses on embedding our leadership and management behaviours with a range of specially tailored training courses. We introduced our Optimise programme which is specifically designed for first time or aspiring managers. In the year ahead, we’ll continue to work with our people on a number of key areas. Through increased “smart working” we’ll drive employee engagement to ensure that working practices benefit the organisation and staff. We’ll develop our diversity and inclusion culture so that all staff can contribute equally. The wellbeing of our people underpins everything we do and helps create the positive culture we have in the business today.