Moving forward | Strategic report
Our people and culture
By working smarter together as one team with one vision, and continuing to live our values, our colleagues are focused on performing to their very best and doing everything we can for our customers.
One team, one vision
Motivated by their passion to improve the lives our customers and enhance their communities, our colleagues are inspired by strong leaders who provide a supportive environment that ensures they can flourish.
Recognising that we need to do more in some areas, our people are taking personal ownership to get things back on track, looking to improve how they work together and with our customers, by enhancing communication, listening, understanding and demonstrating empathy.
Working Smarter Together
In the last 12 months, we’ve continued to adapt to a more flexible approach to work, with colleagues embracing home working and many teams using new technology that enables them to work smarter. Although we’re seeing the benefits of this work, we recognise we’re still on a journey to transforming our approach and become more digitally focused.
To help us progress more quickly, we’ve conducted a detailed digital skills assessment across the organisation and identified where and how we need to deliver learning and development activity.
Our Employment Offer
We’ve continued to review our employment offer to ensure it’s as attractive as possible to existing and new colleagues while remaining sustainable to the business.
Highlights include our decision to pay all frontline Care and Support colleagues the real living wage, significant salary increases to support people with the cost-of-living crisis, and the introduction of a new health cash plan through Westfield Health.
Paid for by Longhurst Group, the health cash plan allows colleagues to claim money back on a range of health and wellbeing costs, including optical, dental, chiropody, sports massage and acupuncture.
Engaging with colleagues
Colleague engagement has remained strong as indicated by our Best Companies results which saw colleagues rate the Group as a one-star, good organisation to work for. We’re pleased with these results, particularly during what has been a challenging time for our people, but we acknowledge we have work to do to realise our ambitions of becoming a three-star company by 2025.
A diverse workforce
Continuing our work with the National Centre for Diversity, we’ve retained the Investors in Diversity award and, having been benchmarked against other organisations, remain one of the National Centre’s top 50 most inclusive places to work.
We’re in the process of modernising our approach to recruitment, taking a more insight-led approach to recruitment marketing and proactively searching for and appointing the best possible talent.
Useful links
Living our values
We’ve had many reasons to celebrate this year, with our inaugural colleague awards ceremony, our Living Our Values Awards, taking place in Nottingham in April.
Featuring over 75 colleagues on the day, the awards recognised how teams and individuals across the organisation truly embraced and lived our values during the last two years.
As colleagues rose to the challenge of the pandemic, dozens were recognised with weekly or monthly accolades, but April’s in-person ceremony was a great chance to celebrate the best of the best and hear, in person, the lengths people had gone to.
Board Members, the Executive Leadership and Directors were joined by shortlisted colleagues and their guests at the ceremony, which also featured a drinks reception and a three-course meal. You can see the highlights from the day here.
We took immense pride in seeing our Director of Customer Experience and Communities, Charmaine Simei, crowned Housing Professional of the Year at the 2021 Women in Housing Awards. The Group also enjoyed national recognition at two industry leading award ceremonies with our Procurement Team shortlisted at the 2021 GO Awards and our Communications Team shortlisted at the Corporate Communications Awards.
Case study
Living our Values Awards 2022
We’ve had many reasons to celebrate this year, with our inaugural colleague awards ceremony, our Living Our Values Awards, taking place in Nottingham in April 2022. Featuring over 75 colleagues on the day, the awards recognised how teams and individuals across the organisation truly embraced and lived our values during the last two years.
As part of our ongoing commitment to the Harry’s Pledge campaign, our carers network provides support for colleagues caring for a relative or friend who, due to ill health, physical or mental illness, disability, frailty or addiction, can’t manage without support.
Colleagues and customers have continued to enjoy free access to Carers UK’s Employers for Carers Network, which includes a range of advice and resources for people juggling work and care.
One year on from the launch of Harry’s Pledge, more than 100 organisations are supporting the campaign, with 53 signed up to the Pledge, and this shows we’ve made real strides with enhancing the profile and reach of the campaign in the last 12 months.
Working with colleagues at Grand Union Housing Group and Greatwell Homes, we’ve also raised tens of thousands of pounds for two worthwhile charities. Our fundraising efforts for MIND and Harry’s Pals have included a 24 Peaks challenge, marathon running challenges and charity auctions.
Moving forward
Related KPIs
By investing in our people and improving our business processes and the systems we use, we’re confident that we’ll be able to deliver efficiencies and make it easier for our colleagues to make a real difference.
We’re implementing and embracing digital services and bringing customer contacts back in-house to deliver faster, better, more joined-up services to our customers.
We’ll continue to invest in technology and platforms, while improving the way we work and upskilling our colleagues to enhance the customer journey and provide seamless integration between our teams, our contractors and the services our customers receive.
Our community-based teams will continue to provide face-to-face services to support customers, which will be enhanced through our new digital capabilities.
Our Care and Support colleagues will also continue to embrace technology, utilising digital solutions that improve the delivery of our service without de-humanising it.
We’ll continue to develop a Group-wide Environmental, Social and Governance Strategy, which will draw a clear link with some of the issues already identified within the work done on ensuring Value for Money (VfM).
Our work on a diversity and inclusion strategy will also continue, helping ensure we’re an inclusive organisation that values the contribution that diversity brings.
By further strengthening stakeholder relationships, and campaigning and influencing for positive change, we’ll pioneer partnership approaches and solutions that contribute to improving the lives of our customers, communities and colleagues.
“We’ll continue to invest in technology and platforms, while improving the way we work to enhance the customer journey and provide seamless integration between our teams, our contractors and our services.”
Our Business Plan incorporates the work needed to bring all existing homes up to EPC level C and we’re part way through a detailed review that assesses the level of works needed to decarbonise our existing homes.
Our future development plans already incorporate a move away from gas boilers and a gradual move to off-site, modular building new homes, as demonstrated at our California Road development.
© Longhurst Group Limited
Longhurst Group Ltd is a charitable housing association registered in England as a community benefit society (Reg. No. 8009) and registered with the Regulator of Social Housing (No. L4277).
Registered Office: 1 Crown Court, Crown Way, Rushden, Northamptonshire NN10 6BS. VAT Reg No. 326 0270 36. A member of the National Housing Federation.