Shiny future

Last week, two great things coincided; our second set of staff roadshows this year and National Apprenticeship Week. Both gave genuine food for thought about how, now more than ever, it is critical that we invest in staff.

Like everybody across the sector we have been reflecting hard on how we maintain our social purpose and moral values as the social, economic and political context around us rapidly shifts in a way that means it is hard to predict the future with any real degree of precision. One thing is clear - we must run strong, resilient and productive businesses, and the best businesses excel because of the people they employ and how they treat them.

This is not about paying the highest wages or giving the most useless ‘perks’ (which are all paid for out of the salary bill anyway). It is about valuing people in their role. It is about valuing people in their role and investing specifically in three things: technical competence, managerial ability and leadership capability - at all levels.

I am a huge advocate of apprenticeships, often used traditionally to build on the skill set of specific trades. They ‘fell out of fashion’ and were wrongly seen as something only for young people who couldn’t achieve through academic routes. Thankfully that view is changing.

The new housing trailblazer the BIS initiative (to improve the quality of apprenticeships) launched earlier this year and is a great step towards us as a sector using those routes again to build the technical competence of our people and build our productivity - 77% of employers believe apprenticeships make them more competitive, and 83% of those who employ apprentices rely on their programme to provide the skilled workers that they need.

Nurturing talent

At Plus Dane we are specifically advocating the 5% club, whose membership consists of companies who have signed up to 5% of their staff over the next five years being young people on structured training schemes. 

Moving on, I am always amazed at how many organisations say that they believe in growing their own managers, but who actually just mean that on the whole they just recruit internally, without any structured approach to building managerial capability. 

Poor management hinders the effective use of skills; the latest data suggests about a quarter of performance gaps between businesses can be attributed to differences in managers’ practices in monitoring, use of targets and people management. We have just developed a structured, mandatory training programme for every person we employ who has managerial responsibility, covering everything from day-to-day activities such as conducting disciplinary investigations through to sound project management. 

Lastly, and most important for me, is our investment in leadership capability. I have been incredibly lucky - having started in the sector straight from school, I worked for people who nurtured me and invested in my ability to lead. Too often we focus on those types of investments when people rise to ‘leadership roles’ within our organisation. At our roadshows I asked “who are the leaders in Plus Dane?”, and was thrilled when a plumber shouted back “all of us”. 

He was so right - we all provide leadership, either to those we manage, or to our colleagues; we demonstrate leadership of our values and we reflect the leadership culture of the organisation to our tenants and customers in everything we do. If we get it right, investment here is what will stop us being just good, and make us great.

We have started with two things - a coaching programme for everybody who has any line management responsibility at all, which began with a rather uncomfortable day for me being observed by a new coach, and with an investment into the Insights programme. The latter began with a psychological profiling of everybody in the organisation (the exact sort which we do when we apply for chief executive roles). 

We were given our individual profiles at the roadshows and coached through them as teams. I think it would be fair to say people loved it; comments ranged from “somebody has been sat in my van with me for six weeks” to “is it a coincidence or not that all the allocations team have similar preferences?”. The work is intended to stretch us all as individuals and also to help each other understand the best ways to communicate with colleagues. We are adopting it as part of our everyday work and building it into performance reviews and team meeting arrangements.

After the roadshows, a colleague I have known a long time sent me a new album by a band I always liked - Underworld - called ‘Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future’. I agree with his sentiment entirely - we do face a shiny future at Plus Dane, and it is 100% based on what our staff will deliver.  

Barbara Spicer, chief executive, Plus Dane