How Believe Housing achieved their corporate strategy goals

From transactional to transformational HR: How Believe Housing achieved their corporate strategy goals

Believe Housing manages around 18,000 homes in the North East of England, making them one of the largest housing associations in the area. They employ over 500 people across a broad mix of expertise, including office-based workers and a team of maintenance and repair operatives in the field.

The multi-award-winning association creates inclusive, vibrant communities by putting tenants at the heart of everything they do. Since its launch, they have adopted a culture of ‘doing the right thing’, whether that be for the business, its employees or customers.

Strategic Challenges

Enhancing employee culture in line with corporate strategy

The association’s first corporate strategy was released in April 2020, outlining its long-term vision to create a life without barriers, for the business, employees and customers. Following the unprecedented period of change caused by the pandemic, they evaluated progress and started working towards the next phase of their strategic planning process.

As outlined in its most recent corporate outline, the association then focused on their people, encouraging employee creativity and autonomous decision-making. They introduced an Innovation Academy, which brought employees together to give them the confidence to solve problems.

The next phase introduced a Wellbeing Strategy, to enhance their supportive working environment. A key focus of this business strategy was on building their existing workplace culture.They needed a solution that allowed their employees to understand their own growth, achieve recognition and adopt the Believe Housing company values.

Engaging a distributed team across various devices

Implementing a unified performance and objective tracking solution was a key driver for the project. With a combination of office workers and field operatives working on wildly different projects, Believe Housing needed a simple way to log, update and track objectives on the go, from any device.

They needed to deliver a solution that didn’t require major in-house development, was compatible with their existing systems and could be launched around tight timescales. Employee ease of use was vital, with the facility for single sign-on, alongside adherence to security measures.

Improving an outdated performance management framework

Believe Housing had an existing performance management solution in place. However, as an ‘out-of-the-box’ product from a global supplier, it offered no scope for flexibility. They needed a product that was aligned to their working practices while tying into their culture and values.

Under the proposed Wellbeing Strategy, employee behaviours and their adoption across the workforce were required reporting metrics. The existing system had no way to facilitate these needs, and the provider didn’t offer bespoke personalisation or development.

In line with their corporate strategy planning process, the business wanted to improve overall delivery by understanding more about employee performance, so created a behaviour framework linked to values.

Believe Housing needed a solution that delivered performance management digitally, which could encompass the association’s culture and values.

Solutions and Results

Software-enabled employee engagement and performance increase