Insight: The Homes and Community Directorate at Islington Council

Embedding culture change – relational practice in a statutory setting

The Homes and Communities Directorate manages the council’s 37,000 properties and offers a range of housing-related services to our tenants and leaseholders. This includes rent and service charge collection, tenancy management and leasehold services, estate, caretaker and concierge services and a vibrant range of community and voluntary sector services including community centres.

Our residents are at the heart of everything we do and our overarching objective is to be an excellent and fair landlord that enables people to live well and thrive. We have a unique opportunity to influence the lives of the people we see every day in and around their homes; spotting when people are struggling, helping them to help themselves, linking them up to other services and the wider community to ensure they get the most out of the fantastic range of opportunities Islington has to offer. Key to this is having strong interpersonal relationships with our residents.

We know that when things go wrong for people, it is often due to a whole range of complex issues including experiences of trauma and abuse, poverty and unemployment, bereavements or other life changing events, health and lifestyle concerns, loneliness and isolation - the list goes on. Often people feel lost and unable to ask for help. This is where our staff can help.

By encouraging our staff to see the whole person – including their strengths rather than just the presenting challenge - unpick the root causes of their problems and help the person to build their own resilience, we feel we can intervene earlier, nip issues in the bud and help make a real difference to people’s lives.

We have taken a number of approaches in order to establish a culture that enables staff to role model relational ways of working with local residents.

In 2017, we launched the Homes and Communities Service Ambassadors Programme. This programme enabled staff from all levels of the department to apply to support an extensive programme of organisational change, with culture change at its heart.

Through a series of ‘Stop Shops’ the Service Ambassadors worked with staff across the department to identify systems, processes and ways of working that prevented staff from working effectively with residents.

Acting as leaders in the department, the Service Ambassadors spent time purposefully establishing working relationships with council departments and voluntary sector partners so that staff were knowledgeable about the wider offer of support available to residents. Responding to staff feedback, the Ambassadors led on work to support staff to improve their health and well-being, to make one-to-one supervision more person centred. This support for staff, has supported a shift in culture where relationships and compassion are becoming increasingly important.

Alongside this, the department has established a series of ‘high performance behaviours’, embedded through training sessions and 360 Degree feedback. This has given us a language to describe the ways of working that better enable us to adopt relational ways of working with staff, partners and most importantly with residents. Behaviours such as empathy, team work, developing people, building confidence, proactivity and customer focus have become increasingly central to the culture within the directorate, and have underpinned our approach to recruitment and selection.

Homes and Communities is two thirds of the way through a large scale reorganisation. In order to ensure that relational ways of working are central to our organisational culture we have recruited to the department’s high performance behaviours, ensuring that our senior leaders, managers and staff team role model approaches that will enable us to become increasingly relational in our work.

Commenting on the reorganisation and changes within the Directorate, Sanjay Singh, the Older People and Physical Disabilities Specialist, commented, “the positive thing about the re-structure is that it has created opportunities for staff to work with people in a holistic and person centred way… the re-structure was a great opportunity to develop my personal and professional career in housing and do the things I really love to do. Supporting vulnerable older/disabled people has always been one of my passions. I have become a Dementia Friends Champion which will enable me to deliver information sessions and allow staff to become ‘dementia friends’. My new role has allowed me to upskill the wider workforce on Dementia and educate staff. I have also collected data on older/disabled residents enabling us to identify how many wheelchair users we have, how many with physical needs, how many are 60+, how many are visually impaired, mental health, hearing impairment, and where the live. This has enabled us to better understand residents and to focus on what is needed, including an increased focus on combating loneliness and Social Isolation.”

Working to undertake a minor adaptation to prevent a risk of fall for an 88-year-old female resident who was living along, Sanjay and his team, saw an opportunity to model relational ways of working. The assessment visit was scheduled for Christmas Eve. So as well as undertaking the assessment, making recommendations and placing an order for adaptations, the team arrived with a small gift and made time to sit down over a cup of tea and conversation. During this conversation the resident talked about her home, family, her interests. The resident really valued the extra time that Sanjay and his team spent with her and the warmth of the approach they took. It also provided an opportunity for the team to connect with the resident on a more human level.

We’ve been working closely with Cripplegate Foundation’s Development Partners, participating in the #HowNotWhat Dialogue. This has provided staff across Homes and Communities to reflect on practice based on relational ways of working. This dialogue has helped to change the narrative in the department. Whilst we will always have to ensure that we deliver what residents need from our services, we’ve become increasingly focussed on ensuring that how we work, creates powerful stories.

We’re working closely with Cripplegate Foundation to embed the #HowNotWhat resources into our staff inductions, organising staff training with the Development Partners and will be producing videos of our work to help strengthen the culture change that we’ve started.