Embedding transformation
How one housing provider has created an dedicated innovation unit to ensure new ideas are not only encouraged but delivered too
Plenty of organisations talk about transformation and innovation, but not all of them put their money where their mouth is. At north-east housing provider Believe Housing, a senior team restructure in 2019 has led to the creation of an entire unit dedicated to the art of transformation.
As part of this process, Believe created a new role: director of culture and transformation. That role sits at the head of a small transformation innovation team, which chief executive Bill Fullen describes as having an “internal consultation” function.
Fullen made this move after looking at some of the reasons organisational change was often so hard to bring about. “What I found is we had lots of ideas, but there was no central place for those ideas to be nurtured and experimented with,” he says. “And so I wanted to create an internal kind of consultation [unit], where the consultant worked with people to develop our ideas, to investigate whether they were scalable or whether we could simply deliver them by tweaking things at the margins.”
Innovation facilitation
Key to this idea is that the team remains small and works in collaboration with other parts of the business, so that innovation isn’t siloed. “Their role isn’t to do innovation,” explains Fullen. “Their role is to help others do it. We’ve invested in a small team to give them the techniques and tips on how to ask the right questions and to identify innovations. I didn’t want to create a big culture and transformation section or directorate because people would then say: ‘Well, that’s their job’, rather than it being a whole organisation approach.”
What the innovation unit has done at Believe is allow it to challenge certain assumptions about how things are delivered. This was particularly true as the association grappled with the challenges of continuing to provide services through the lockdowns of 2020.
“I think the key change was more about a mindset,” says Fullen. “It was about encouraging people that it was okay to introduce new things and just get on and deliver them, rather than having a beautifully crafted project plan that took two years to develop and then by the time you get to the end, you’ve lost sight of what you were trying to achieve.”
Bill Fullen CEO, Believe Housing
“It was about encouraging people that it was okay to introduce new things and just get on and deliver them, rather than having a beautifully crafted project plan that took two years to develop and then by the time you get to the end, you’ve lost sight of what you were trying to achieve.”
Proactive approach
One of the changes that Believe initiated during the first lockdown in spring 2020 was to take a more proactive approach to tenancy management. The association made around 18,000 proactive calls to tenants during the year to check in with people and find out if any work was needed on their homes.
Simultaneously, it began to talk tenants through how to do some minor repairs themselves, rather than wait for their landlord to find a contractor. The result? Believe’s repairs backlog actually reduced by half through the first year of the pandemic, from around 4,000 to 2,000.
“For me, it's about turning around that dynamic [where] we do everything for customers,” says Fullen. “If you give customers the means to do it, then not all tenants would do it, but there will be some who would be able to do it. That means that we’re not investing resource into doing those minor repairs, [so] we could direct that resource into doing the more difficult repairs or the repairs for older and vulnerable people who couldn’t do it themselves.”
No return to ‘business as usual’
For Fullen, it’s an example of how the response to Covid doesn’t need to be about emergency, temporary measures before a return to ‘business as usual’. Instead, the pandemic has opened him and his organisation up to new ways of looking at their operating model.
“There’s a few things that have gone on in the pandemic that for me are a portal to the new service model. It would be disastrous to simply go back to where we were before the pandemic if we don’t learn from some of the benefits that were created through the last 18 months or so.”
