By Mark Walker, income maximization director, Mobysoft

Focusing on culture is a tricky one to navigate for many social housing providers, especially with a lot of organisations still primarily working from home or adopting a hybrid approach.

Whilst strategic and corporate approaches to performance, people and culture is no doubt an important facet of any strategy designed to improve outcomes and ways of working, I’m going to concentrate on the actions frontline ‘people managers’ (heads of service, team leaders or managers) can implement in this article (as that’s where the majority of my experience lies).

An operational viewpoint

In my role as an income maximization director at Mobysoft, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time onsite with customers. Typically, I’m onsite four days out of five, supporting social housing providers with best practice training, people management sessions and delivering income collection events, both in-person and online

I’ve delivered 567 sessions over the last three years (completing my 400th onsite training or meeting session last week!) and in that time I’ve picked up an incredible amount of best practice and new thinking from operational and strategic layers. From those 500+ sessions that I’ve either led or been part of, I’ve observed that the following traits are always present within high performing teams:

• Strong leadership and performance
• Really good team morale and happy staff
• Accountability – people taking ownership for performance and culture.

But just exactly how do teams go about instilling the right culture to ensure that these qualities are ingrained within? In my experience, it’s not an exact science, but there are a few things that you can do to put your team on its way to incubating the right culture. Here are my seven tips to help you get started.

Recruitment

I’ve always been a bit of a control-freak when it comes to recruitment. Recruiting the right people with the right behaviors and values is key. Experience is important; however, you could recruit someone with 20 years of experience but 20 years of negativity.

Sometimes it’s good to be brave. Sometimes you might need to recruit people with little or no housing experience. They might just have all the qualities you’re looking for to make your department even better, however.

I’d always advocate recruiting people with energy, enthusiasm, a willingness to learn – and those who like dealing with people.  That’s why frontline officers do the job right.

You can teach someone the technical skills of, say, a housing officer or income officer role, but you can’t teach a positive mindset. You can’t teach someone who’s prepared to give their discretionary effort. And you can’t teach someone who’s prepared to be solution-focused.

We all get recruitment wrong sometimes, but if you recruit the right people, it can be truly powerful. You could have the best systems or the best procedures in the world but if you haven’t got the right people, it never works. Good staff make you look better too!

Performance framework

Individuals excel when they are held accountable for performance. One of my colleagues recently made a great observation: “People play differently when the scores are being kept”.   

Sometimes too many targets can mean people switch off. A basic set of targets leading to the overall strategic targets, however, gives staff clarity and accountability for performance.

A strong performance framework needs to be compelling, and easy to understand. League tables can be good, but they can also turn people off. I’ve worked in organisations where the publishing of individual performance against colleagues was a positive – it created a healthy, competitive environment and led us to be high performing. Plan B is to have the numbers, the stats and the facts, but to be clear with people in 1:1s where they stand against their colleagues.

Energy

Enthusiastically talking about performance creates energy, enthusiasm and momentum. How you approach this can be tailored to whatever you think works best for your team – it could be in the form of weekly or monthly bulletins (no more than two pages long), or another method entirely. It’s down to you to gauge what will be most engaging for the makeup of the team.

Bulletins and sharing successes via an accessible forum are great ways of recognising individuals, praising and thanking them. After all, who doesn’t like a thank you?

This particular approach also shows the rest of the business there’s good stuff happening.   Being in a team where there’s lots of positive messages creates momentum – it makes people feel better and, in turn, they are happier in what they do. Ultimately, this results in better service for customers.

You could add in visuals, pictures and fun stuff too – it should be work-related but also with humour. You could run a weekly bulletin for 12 weeks in the build up to Christmas (or the build up to yearend) to boost end-of-year performance figures.

1:1s

Do you look forward to doing them? Do your staff look forward to doing them?

1:1s are a great place to develop trust and confidence. They are a key part of developing relationships. Have yours become rigid and boring? Here are some interesting things I’ve picked up from others:

• Change the setting – could you go out for a coffee and run the 1:1 that way?
• Take someone out for lunch – sometimes a different environment can lead to better conversations
• Go walking – what better way to stimulate physical and mental well-being than going out for a walk? You don’t even have to be side by side. But you could talk to each other through your mobile phone and get a good 60 minutes of fresh air at the same time
• Shadowing – could your next 1:1 be converted to shadowing someone? Going out on visits and spending a morning with someone is a great way to build rapport, plus you also get to see local neighborhoods and estates and find out what’s going on with your tenants.

You could ask the people you manage to prepare answers to two questions you want them to think about as part of a 1:1. Examples include:

• Paint me a picture of what a great officer looks like
• If you were in my shoes, what would you do to improve the service?
• Name a colleague who’s stood out to you over the last six months and why
• How would you rate our approach to X out of 10? If it’s a six, ask them what they would have to do to get to a seven or eight
• How good do you think we are at getting new tenants off to a great start?
• Give me team-building event idea.

1:1s have the potential to:

• Build confidence – identifying things to praise people for (the power of positive reinforcement)
• Mean honest conversations – what is or isn’t working
• Be a great way to fix niggles
• Be a strong way of settings expectations (ask what the next six weeks look like until the next 1:1?)
• Be results-focused
• Challenge negativity or query why someone might be unhappy.

Building interdepartmental relationships

Sometimes relationships across a business can be fragmented and a silo mentality can develop. It’s easier than you’d think for teams to fall into solely focusing on their own team or department rather than the bigger picture.

I remember many years ago leading a team where the relationships with other teams could have been better. A commitment from my people managers was to drive and change that by identifying at least five other people in other teams where the relationship needed to be much better.

Our commitment would go on to be the driver in improving relationships (rather than waiting for it to happen). This is what we did:

WHO – work out those people we had to improve relationships with and work better with

WHY – why will they help us with our goals and targets?

WHAT – what is it we need to talk to them about?

WHEN – how often are we going to meet them? (we agreed 45 mins every six weeks without fail)

HOW – in what format are we going to meet? (Ideally face to face).

It was one of the best things we ever did. After 18 months we had very little to discuss.  Problems, barriers and issues were addressed and overcome, purely as a result of taking the initiative.

Setting a vision/having a plan

When was the last time you:

• Set a vision with the team on what great looks like?
• Painted a picture to officers on what a great housing or income officer looks like?
• Painted a picture of what a great people manager looks like?
• Put together an action plan for the year?
• Put together an action plan for the year that’s co-created by and with frontline teams?

Having a vision can get people enthused and excited. Getting staff to buy into the process is key. Can you work towards something special?

You don’t need a massive excel spreadsheet with a ton of objectives to make an action plan. Just five or six well-chosen key objectives is all you need. Creating a concise action plan demonstrates to the rest of the business (and your own manager!) that there’s a clear way forward and a defined plan on what you’re doing.

I always remember a director saying to me once after a tricky six months: “What’s the Plan, Mark?”. I didn’t have one. So, every year after that for the next 10, I made sure that I created one in conjunction with frontline teams (because invariably your staff have got the best ideas).

Team-building events

This is something that’s faded somewhat post-Covid. I hear a lot of frontline teams reminisce about the old days of team-building events, ruing that they’ve largely died away because of hybrid working.

On the flipside, I’ve heard of a few organisations resurrecting team-building events on a quarterly basis because they can see how powerful they can be with getting everyone together, improving team morale and having a bit of fun. Being with your colleagues can improve wellbeing and make work more interesting.

Inevitably, there might be a percentage of team members who don’t like that kind of thing.  I’d advise on focusing on the 75/80% of people that do want to engage, rather than being bogged down by the 20%.

Not all teams or departments will have the budget for the suggestions below, but you can use them for inspiration and adapt to suit your situation:

Escape rooms – a great way for individuals to work together, solve puzzles and find solutions under pressure

Treasure hunts – there’s loads of free, local treasure hunts in most cities and towns if you have a look. Google is your friend!

Breakfasts/lunches – but mix them with the team going out en masse to local neighborhoods and estates. I heard of one team combining this with doing door knocking at a tricky block of flats. They supported 100 tenants but then finished with an hour-long lunch at the local greasy spoon

Bake-offs – staff baking and bringing in cakes and treats is a great way to get people together. You could raise money for a good cause at the same time by asking for donations to a local or national charity. Charities benefit and people get to try the best Victoria Sponges!

International Food Day – why not celebrate the diverse cultures of the team by asking people to bring in food from different countries? This type of activity isn’t only a treat for your team’s tastebuds but also a great way to bring people together

Pub quizzes – who doesn’t like a pub quiz? They’re a great way to get the team together.  You could even make it work-related and base it on policies and procedures (ok, maybe not).

If you’re struggling for team-building event ideas – feel free to reach out. I think they are really important. The best teams I’ve worked in were the ones where people have worked SUPER hard, but they’ve also had a little bit of fun too.

Success in performance, people and culture isn’t about grand strategies or fancy PowerPoint decks – it’s about taking real, practical steps that make a difference every day. Whether it’s hiring the right people, fostering accountability or occasionally bribing your team with cake, small actions add up to big results. So, go forth, lead with purpose, and if all else fails, there’s always the pub quiz!

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Mark Walker is an income maximisation director at Mobysoft, the social housing sector’s most trusted data analytics partner. Mark has extensive experience in the social housing sector across multiple functions. He’s held roles including Director of Customer Accounts and Lettings, Head of Income and Customer Experience Manager. Liaising with our customer base to share best practice is Mark’s main focus and he also coauthors and delivers the many and varied in-person and web-based training events Mobysoft holds.