The BSHR recommended that social landlords should work with their staff to improve their repairs and maintenance services.
Colleagues have a unique perspective on repairs and maintenance, and providing them with meaningful, structured opportunities to feed in their views can help reveal deficiencies in the service or ways that it could work better.
As part of our broader Rethinking Repairs and Maintenance project, we have developed two principles that social landlords should follow to meaningfully involve their colleagues and staff members in reviewing and scrutinising repairs and maintenance services.
Specifically, social landlords should look to include colleagues from all areas of the organisation in service review to understand their views, and reflect their contributions in workload models and professional development frameworks.
This page explains why these principles are important, and provides some ideas and examples of what social landlords are doing to achieve this.
Include colleagues from all areas of the organisation
The end-to-end repairs and maintenance process involves colleagues from multiple areas of a social landlord’s operations. This is not just those working in repairs and maintenance teams, but includes frontline housing officers, contact centre operatives, works planners, complaints handling officers, tenant liaison officers, as well as colleagues in finance and procurement departments. It also necessarily involves colleagues at different levels of seniority.
All colleagues who encounter the repairs and maintenance process have a unique viewpoint. They see and become experts in a small part of the overall system, and will instinctively understand the ways that it works well or could be improved. Through their interactions with other colleagues, they also have an important perspective on communication processes and how different parts of the overall system relate to each other. Residents have told us that they see this too: that Housing Officers or repairs operatives will sometimes have good ideas about how to deal with certain issues, but that they sometimes aren’t taken into account by those managing the service.
Beyond this, other colleagues not obviously involved in the process will also have an important perspective. For example, colleagues with remits spanning domestic abuse, anti-social behaviour, or safeguarding can help you understand if your service is taking advantage of opportunities to identify residents who are vulnerable and in need of additional support.
Social landlords looking to bring their staff members into the design and review of repairs and maintenance processes should recognise this variegated expertise and seek to include as many relevant colleagues from across the business as possible.
A first step in doing this is to conduct a mapping exercise to understand who from across your organisation should be invited to contribute to reviewing your repairs and maintenance service. You should try to take account of colleagues who are directly involved in the repairs and maintenance process, however tangentially, and colleagues who can bring alternative perspectives or challenge your thinking.
Once you have undergone this process, there are several ways you can begin to gather feedback. Some of the examples we have learned about in the research are:
- Including a wide range of colleagues within procurement and contract negotiation processes.
- Utilising colleague engagement forums to discuss your repairs and maintenance service.
- Where applicable, using ‘staff who are customers’ groups to gather insights from colleagues who are also residents.
- Undertaking thematic focus groups with different teams to understand their viewpoints, e.g. with property leadership teams, operations teams, or contact centre teams.
- Setting up bespoke working groups, including as a minimum colleagues who are most acutely involved in the repairs and maintenance process or who might be particularly affected by proposed service redesign.
- ‘Ask me anything’ sessions with senior leadership teams and asset managers, allowing colleagues to ask questions and feed in perspectives anonymously.
- Establishing roles such as ‘Employee Engagement Champions’ in repairs and maintenance services.
Importantly, these engagement activities need to be designed in a way that enables colleagues to give their honest, untarnished view of your repairs and maintenance services. Residents have told us that while all colleagues should be involved in reviewing repairs and maintenance services, they’d be worried that they are afraid to say what they really think. Ensuring that you create a safe, open space for colleagues to openly feed in their views is therefore vital, as without it you might not get the feedback that could really make a difference in improving your processes.
Reflect their contributions in workload models and professional development frameworks
The BSHR emphasised that employees of social landlords, especially frontline housing staff working directly with residents, are experiencing enormous pressures and demands on their time. It also noted that challenging workloads are contributing to high rates of staff turnover and making it more difficult for residents to communicate with their landlord.
In this context, asking colleagues from across the organisation to feed into the design and review of repairs and maintenance processes could be experienced as burdensome, or as one more task that colleagues need to add to an already overwhelming list. There is a risk that this might lead to alienation, or a perception that the views of colleagues are being invited but not adequately appreciated. It is therefore critical that colleague contributions are sufficiently accounted for in workload models, and that colleagues are supported to incorporate their engagement into continuing professional development (CPD) frameworks.
There is no single approach to doing this, as it will be dependent on the internal organisation of your teams, your HR processes, and the methods of engagement you are looking to use. It will also depend on current and predicted future demands on your colleagues’ time. In all cases, working closely with service managers to understand their teams’ current capacity to engage and ensuring that you are not requesting feedback at particularly pressured times is important.
Adequately incorporating your colleagues’ contributions into their workload is important across the board, but is especially vital if you are asking colleagues to be involved in lengthy or time-consuming forms of engagement. For example, if you are asking colleagues to sit on a working group that will examine different aspects of your repairs and maintenance service, time for this will need to be properly carved out from their current workloads.
Lastly, ensuring that your colleagues have visibility over any improvements you make is critical. Try to avoid engagement that might be perceived as extractive, whereby you gather feedback from your colleagues without making visible how that feedback has led to change. Ensuring that colleagues feel meaningfully involved in reviewing your repairs and maintenance process will help to secure their buy-in, and ultimately help to build more consistent feedback loops that can be utilised across the lifespan of your repairs and maintenance contracts.
