Let's innovate

At Derwentside Homes we know that innovation is key to engaging with our employees and creating an atmosphere in which staff take pride in their work and the organisation as a whole.

We have taken an innovative approach both to how we deliver services to our customers and how we develop a culture of engagement internally among our employees.

For example, over the past two years we have invested heavily in training and organisational development. This has given us a greater understanding of the need to balance our performance with a strategy that allows us to engage fully with our people.

We know cultivating an engaging culture cannot be achieved overnight, it requires collective leadership. Our executive team and heads of service have all been through a 360 degree feedback exercise, with their leadership styles assessed by their peers and teams.

They have been coached on how to respond to this feedback, what it means to them as leaders and how they operate as a team. Our other managers are now going through a leadership development programme, allowing us to develop a core management style which increases motivation, innovation and adaptability.

We also understand the importance of being adaptable and innovative when it comes to meeting the demands of the operating environment in which we work.

Welfare reform has been a key driver for innovation and improvement for our customers. We invested in a new Welfare Rights and Money Advice Team so we could provide a dedicated service to our customers. The teams’ drive and dedication has resulted in more than 1,000 customers receiving welfare and money advice and more than £3m of additional benefits claimed for customers.

Following public sector cuts, innovation has also been key to supporting our older and more vulnerable customers. Our teams developed a new service to deliver in-house out-of-hours emergency response, with staff given the opportunity to train for this new role. This has provided excellent value for money but is also more responsive and tailored to tenants needs.

Other innovative projects include Social Housing Enterprise Durham (SHED) and Brighter Futures , which were both ideas generated by staff aimed at tackling unemployment by providing advice and training to local people.

With the upcoming introduction of universal credit in our areas, digital inclusion is a key priority and staff have taken on additional training to allow them to support customers to get online.

Encouraging ongoing staff development is key to engagement and we have seen a number of recent success stories in terms of external awards among our apprentices and other employees.

We believe involving staff in key decisions is important so set up a Workplace Improvement Group which involves staff from across the organisation acting as representatives for the whole workforce to ensure everyone has the opportunity to have their say. The group also runs regular social events which have proved a great way of bringing teams together.

One of our greatest success stories when it comes to engaging with customers and staff was the introduction of Derwentside Homes’ mascot, AL the Gator. Born out of a suggestion by employees, Al has proved to be a real hit, with people regularly following his antics on Twitter and Facebook.

He has also been the inspiration for a variety of projects, including our staff extranet site AL-net, our mobile digital unit Digit-AL and our work around universal credit, which will be branded Univers-AL.

Despite all that has been done so far to encourage innovation and engagement, we recognise that we are still on a journey, which is why we were so pleased to take the opportunity to be part of Inside Housing’s Innovation Index.

Karen Morris, head of community investment & customer services, Derwentside Homes