Last week was National Social Housing Safety and Compliance Week. A very important week where health, safety and compliance professionals gather to learn, talk about particular issues that have arisen, discuss best practices and ultimately create safer homes for customers. During the week we listened to other professionals, residents and colleagues who talked about delivering changes and transforming safety culture.
Our very own Director of Property, Victoria Tomlinson, and Fleur Whittingham Head of Health, Safety and Compliance ended the week by presenting an innovative piece around how we actively involve our customers in everything we do – health, safety and compliance being no different. Our customers have helped, and are continuing to, shape our ways of working, our practices and scrutinise our methods to make positive changes to our services and there delivery.
Connexus has been actively making changes, embedding a compliance culture where we invest in our colleagues and systems to ensure everyone is safe, at work and at home. It’s become a core way of thinking. Our Board members and Executive Management team have been key to making sure that we all have the right resources, training and systems in place to do our jobs well. We spoke to them, to get their viewpoints - here.
For us, health and safety training is a vital part, ensuring that colleagues understand its importance and role in sustaining a culture with Health and Safety at its heart. Even during a global pandemic, health, safety and compliance hasn’t been far from our minds. We have continued to train our teams with an astonishing 1448 training sessions being held – most of these being in an online environment. We also have launched a PRIDE in health and safety, in which each colleague has signed up to, to make change happen.
Alongside this journey with a new culture, we also took an innovative look at our customers and our involvement with them as part of the Together with Tenants initiative, something we were early adopters of. We started to do things differently – we involved our customers, they became the heart of our decision making and we embedded this approach across the organisation.
For us the National Social Housing Safety and Compliance Week conferences was a real chance to talk about how we were making positive changes, to colleagues, embedding a safety and compliance culture and ultimately involving customers in everything we do.
Having been an active member of the week we felt it was important to look back at what we, as Connexus, have taken away from the events; and what we hope other organisations have taken away from our presentation. We spoke to Vicki, our Director of Property and Fleur, our Head of Health, Safety and Compliance to get their thoughts.
Vicki, our Director of Property explained that:
“For me the huge focus is on improving safety across the sector, a real energy to share and learn from each other. A clear agreement across the board that customer’s needed to be at the heart of this work and informing our decision making. For me the clear passion and drive to improve things was electric for the will to do the best we can for our customers rather than focusing on legal compliance was refreshing. An amazing week to be involved with.
Fleur, our Head of Health, Safety and Compliance stated that:
“The week achieved its aims of shining a light on safety, culture and behaviours. We were delighted to participate, as well as being asked to present. We learned that we are stronger working as a collective with similar organisations and sharing ideas. There was so much food for thought, and lots of best practise shared when we think about accessing customer’s homes, leaseholders, and the quality of our data which all pose a risk to any organisations landlords compliance duties.
Fleur explained:
We really were grateful for the opportunity to present at the conference, and we hope that it has shown that Connexus is on a journey. Making sure that our relationships with customers are resilience and inclusive and that the customers voice very genuinely influences decisions about services we provide, their homes, their safety and their wider community.
For us, the Together with Tenants initiative, has helped us to focus on landlord compliance, to try to empower customers to challenge and question our performance and realign and ultimately strengthen our accountability to customers. We actively shared at the conference some of the innovative work we are completing with customers in the area of landlord compliance. We have successfully developed a KPI dashboard, completed desktop auditing and created focus groups on safety and Fire Safety Audits. I really hope that we have shown how much we care about our customers and our communities.
Find out more about the conference - https://connexus-group.co.uk/news/national-social-housing-safety-compliance-week
