By Kate Lindley, Service Lead for Digital and Data for Socitm Advisory.

2021 was a year of challenge and choices across the sector – from managing the impact of the pandemic, rising costs, and feeling the impacts of ‘the great resignation’ to balancing the need to develop new housing supply with investment in existing stock.

Hybrid working is here to stay

We start the year yet again in a position of uncertainty, with the Omicron variant sweeping across the UK. The adaptations housing providers have already made to more remote and hybrid ways of working will fully embed this year, with more organisations moving permanently to hybrid models, and some looking to divest of large office spaces as much of the workforce operates more remotely, supported by modern technology.

The move to hybrid working will also prompt deeper thought about how we design our homes. In an age where hybrid working is becoming a norm for many, there are real questions about how we design our spaces to meet these new needs.

Does the space we create for our tenants need to change to incorporate quiet space for working? Does internet connectivity become a necessary utility for society to function – and what more could / should providers do to make this affordable?

There are no easy answers here, but as the world changes, it’ll be important for providers to reflect on what the societal shift means for the expectations that tenants have of their homes.

Customer-centric services

While the new Tenant Satisfaction Measures are a welcome step forward, and we all know that the sector loves benchmarking, the reality is that our tenants aren’t comparing us to one another – they’re comparing us to every other responsive, reliable service provider out there.

It follows that to meet tenant expectations, we first need to understand what they are, and we need to get far smarter about truly customer-centric service delivery.

Providers can only do the basics well if they understand tenant expectation – and can only do that by making better use of data, using every touchpoint to create value and generate insight and by meaningfully involving tenants in shaping what they provide.

There are great examples from retail and other sectors that could be used in housing, as well as opportunities to use technology to support a shift from reactive, expensive customer service delivery to an approach that’s more open, preventative, and pre-emptive, starting with the basics, like improving communication for core processes like repairs, all the way through to making use of IOT devices to detect humidity and environmental conditions, to extending existing care services and moving to more predictive maintenance.

And staff are key too…

Across the sector, housing teams and their managers have had a couple of tough years, and that looks set to continue.

The combined impacts of Covid and wage inflation in some areas means many providers have faced an unprecedented level of churn, particularly among skilled operatives.

To retain great people, salary won’t be the only consideration. It’ll be critical to improve job satisfaction by equipping teams with the tools and skills they need to do their jobs well – using IT to make their working life easier, as well as to stay in regular communication to embed a team dynamic.

While that takes effort to achieve across a dispersed workforce, the difference that the combination of factors can make can be significant.

Greater involvement of frontline teams in service design will also start to embed, given the staff who are closest to customers are also the ones who can best advise on how services might be improved.

Data, data everywhere…

In recent years, the sector has become increasingly aware of the need to better manage its data and of the possibilities of using it to provide deeper insight to deliver better services.

This year will be the year of data – where those providers who are still operating with manual interventions and spreadsheets will start to address long-known risks in their control frameworks, driven by a need to use modern tools to improve data accuracy to ensure compliance – and by the push towards more customer-centric delivery approaches that can only be achieved by holding clean, relevant data about tenants and customers.

The providers who’ve already made investments in getting the basics right will start to see the fruits of their labour as they’re more easily able to understand tenant need, use data to drive improvements and efficiency, and bring data together to model different scenarios and more effectively support decision making.

Carbon reduction

The Climate Change Committee has assessed that to meet zero carbon / near zero carbon by 2050, buildings emissions need to fall by just under 50% well before that – and that by the early 2030s, all the UK’s buildings should be energy efficient.

Already, providers are modelling what investment is likely to be needed to make their homes more energy efficient and to move towards decarbonisation, and the impact on business plans has been well reported.

In January the first Wave Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund grants will be awarded, and this year will see government, local authorities, lenders, investors, and tenants themselves taking a keener interest in this agenda, with more case studies about options around approaches that might be taken and the considerations needed in relation to behavioural change as well as technology.