By Linsay Baverstock, Colleague Experience Lead, settle

We’re settle, a resident-focused housing association working across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and South Cambridgeshire. We provide just over 10,000 households with a place to call home.

At settle, our values shape our organisation: we want colleagues to work collaboratively, to trust one another and to be proud to work in social housing and we want our business to be bold, pioneering and entrepreneurial. These values guide the way we work and the decisions we make, ensuring that everything we do helps deliver on our purpose.

We’re a team of around 300 colleagues with a wide range of experience of working in the housing sector and beyond. What connects us is our passion for social housing and the power it has to transform people’s lives.

We’re pleased to have worked closely with the CIH since the launch of their professional standards in 2021 and support them in understanding what professionalism should look like in the sector. Whilst doing this we also took the opportunity at settle to consider what professionalism means to our organisation, colleagues and customers.

To support us in understanding what professionalism means to all colleagues, both at settle and in the outside world, we held ‘Let’s talk professionalism’ workshops at every team meeting. Our findings told us that professionalism is much more than qualifications. Culture and ethics, behaviours, skills and knowledge also play a key part, along with continuous personal development. We’ve used this insight and understanding to shape our professionalism plan at settle.

We welcome the increasing focus on professionalism which underpins the work of the housing sector. The importance of this isn’t to be taken lightly. For residents they rightly require us to get things right for them. Professionalism ensures we get things right more of the time and aspire to get even more things right time and time again.

Professionalism is important but it’s how we do things that makes the lasting difference. We’re confident in our progress so far in addition to the mandatory qualifications and have approached professionalism at settle in a collaborative way with colleagues through a variety of streams to date.

Some of the things we have done include:

  • Setting every colleague an objective set to achieve 12 hours CPD throughout the year, with us sharing CPD opportunities across the organisation through weekly comms and signposting to ensure accessibility for all
  • Writing a professionalism policy to set out what we aim to achieve, our principles of professionalism and the positive outputs we expect for both colleagues and customers
  • Introducing a professionalism academy which sees all colleagues complete bespoke settle training with further development opportunities for aspiring talent
  • Introduced ‘housewarmings’ for all new colleagues to fully support them with insight and understanding of the sector, settle and the customer journey. In place of a one-day induction we now immerse every new colleague from day one with a dedicated week of development which covers key areas of settle through interactive learning and collaborative networking
  • Having a dedicated resource at settle within the people team who’s a member of the CIH professional standards committee and who’s been working closely with CIH and the department of levelling up on the recommended accredited qualifications, timescales and logistics. This alignment has supported us in understanding the requirements and considering what else we can do around professionalism.

To ensure our attitude to professionalism is considered and collaborative, we continue to work closely with our colleague forum to create an engaged approach to professionalism with both colleagues and customers at the forefront. Our approach to professionalism will inevitably grow and change –however, the four key elements of qualifications, culture and ethics, behaviours, skills and knowledge that sit within this will be our key professionalism pillars.

Although the change to regulation was expected, and one we welcome to ensure professionalism in the sector, it’s imperative that we don’t see this as a tick-box exercise and instead embrace the opportunities that arise from this sector-wide focus. The potential impact on customers and their lives from thinking broader and not just fulfilling mandatory requirements is immense and one we should all be open to embracing.