People and transformation director Louise Wagstaff outlines how we have continued to grow over the last year; employing more people to deliver more services and offering opportunities and development to our colleagues. 

We now employ more than 600 people, all committed to doing the best for our customers.

Since April 2018, we have been joined by eight trade apprentices in our property directorate and over the course of the year, we have also welcomed degree level trainees to our client services team. This has been possible as several of our existing employees have taken up the opportunity to gain new skills using our apprenticeship levy funding. This includes higher-level training in the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) qualifications for our colleagues in retirement living to help them grow personally and develop their own roles and understanding of the business.

E-learning

We launched our new e-learning platform in October 2018 to give our people ready access to a wide range of learning to support their roles and to encourage their own development. Along with more traditional forms of training, this means we have delivered 644 training courses to 3922 delegates over the year.

We continue to see extraordinary fundraising efforts from our amazing employees, including walking miles for Macmillan, running marathons and completing international cycle rides. 

Our Group charity for the year was Mind and we raised a total of £1,136. At Christmas, food bank collections were held across the business with our generous colleagues committed to giving back to local organisations that do so much for our customers.

Transformation

Following our first staff survey as a Group in May 2018, we have worked hard to develop our culture; introducing a managers’ forum, replacing annual appraisals with new regular reviews and rolling out Group-wide training to educate, inform and empower our people to create a really positive working environment.

In an exciting move for the Group, we’re taking the first steps towards using good data and great business systems to transform our business and modernise our ways of working. This means we can focus even more of our time on the customers who need it most. Our programme and improvement office is collaborating across the Group to build our new programme, which will support the delivery of the corporate plan by 2023.

We continue to grow and offer a wide range of career opportunities and if you are interested in joining us, please follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter and keep an eye on our recruitment pages for our latest vacancies.