Helena Moore From Bromford Housing Association and Their Culture

A little bit about Bromford and our journey. We are known as what you might have called in the past a housing association, but that's becoming one of our F words now in the organisation. And what we prefer to be known as is a social enterprise, and that's because we're very much more than that. Then dealing just with the housing issues that we, that we used to we definitely have a social purpose and there's some information on what that social purposes is there.

I don't need to read that out to you, but it is about inspiring people and that's not just about our customers. That's also about our colleagues because we very much believe that. Happy colleagues, happy workplaces, great customer service, happy customers all goes hand in hand to support our bottom line and whilst a lot of organizations like ourselves describe themselves as not for profit.

We are a very profit hungry organization. We make around 40 million pounds a year and we play that back in to what we do, which is about inspiring people to be their best. I guess really we've been on a journey. We've been changing our relationship with our customers over the last 18 months.

To two years housing associations known as the tenant landlord relationship. And providing people weren't too bad. We got the renting, whether that was from them or whether it was from housing benefit. That was fine. It was our income coming in and, and so we ticked along, but we said, actually, that isn't what we want to be about.

If we are genuinely about. Inspiring people to be their best. We need to do more than just provide them with a house to live in. And we've been doing a number of pilots in how we deal with our customer service offering to help us deliver that. What we didn't do very well was take our colleagues on that journey with us and describe to our colleagues what we were doing.

And our, our head of communications is in the room and I'm surprised she's still got any hair left. She isn't really grey . In fact, I think that's probably you know yeah . Color, color, I think was the word you're looking for Alex. So, cause it's taken us about 18 months to decide how we describe what our new way of doing things is to our colleagues.

So we've got quite a bit of catching up to do and taking colleagues on that journey. And I don't think we've been very fair to them in how we've done that. So fortunately, we've got to the end of that, and we've now got a way of articulating so we can take colleagues on the journey with us, with customers.

So a bit of a learning for us in terms of perhaps thinking about some of that in advance. But we do believe that everybody has potential, and that includes our customers and our colleagues. What we call that is the deal the Bromford deal. So we have a deal with our, our customers and we also have a deal with our colleagues.

And what the deal is about is just about everything we do. It's our whole relationship with our customers and also with our, our colleagues. Every contact, every conversation and every touch point we have with them. That's what we call the deal because it's much more about this, not just this tenant and landlord relationship.

As our part of the deal, we provide a whole range of services to help people realise their potential in housing, health, money and in their community as well. So housing is just one piece of what we do. It was interesting when I was looking at this, this slide this morning on the, on the train, just refreshing my mind.

I think what we've titled is a lot of things that these pilots that we're doing on how we're changing our relationship with customers we've called it a customer transformation program. Well, that won't be surprised. I'm sure you've all got transformation programs going on, and I don't know, I'm getting less and less comfortable.

I don't know what you feel with the word transformational because I think just everything we do is a constant journey, and I think we described so much as transformation. I think Actually, transformation is just the norm, maybe that's one of the things we should banish to the list of F words too.

So we work in four areas these are the four areas that we work in, and we pilot lots of different initiatives in those areas. And what we do, then, is we then decide whether we can scale that up into the wider customer population. And we also now do that with customers. We have four squads that work around these areas, and we now have a fifth squad that works around our colleagues as well.

These are some of the types of pilots that we've, that we've been working on. Won't explain all of those to you, but we've been running different small scale projects to test out, do these things work for our customers. We have an innovation lab in the organization. We use the lab and we do real testing with small amounts of customers to see if these initiatives work.

And here's the results of one of those, which is starting well. In our industry, if there's anybody else here from housing, they'll know that, People very often fail in a tenancy when they start. They may not have had a tenancy before. It may be they've come from a hostile environment or never had their own tenancy before.

So actually having a starting well program for customers is really cost effective for us because we get less failures. When people join take on a tenancy with us on. These are just some of the facts and figures that we've learned from the pilot. And by doing that, what we've learned with this particular project is we can scale that up now for customers coming into the organization.

It's worth us doing that. So that's just the result of one of our pilots. What I want to ask you, my first question to you, to have just a minute's discussion on. I shared with you, I confessed to you, I fessed up, that our communication with our colleagues about our new relationship with our customers and the direction that we were going with in the business wasn't terribly well communicated and people were getting quite confused and still describing us purely as a houseing organisation and not really realising we've got all of these, Other areas going on.

There might have been some people very close to the front line that could see that happening, that could see the big picture, but certainly if you thought about people in our HR teams, our finance teams all of the back office teams, none of those, banking, I worked in banking when I first started work, and banking was all about customer service.

By the time I left, A couple of years later it was all about sales. I didn't join banking to be in sales. I joined banking to be in customer service and we're in that kind of, kind of place. They are still sorting out my cockups on direct debits now and I left the bank about 30 odd years ago, I think.

I wasn't very good at it actually, fortunately I'm not in finance. So she's always good to know. But yeah, we've got this skills journey to go on with our colleagues. Now we are nervous. Some of them may not make may not make that transition. We've got to think about what we need to be doing with them and how we're going to take them there.

So so some interesting challenges is coming up for us on the people side. What I wanted to move on to was thinking about how our leadership impacts on that culture. And a question here for us is about what the deal with our colleagues is and what impact that leadership is going to have in taking that forward for us.

We've been doing some work with a futurist specifically around this, and I'm sure lots of you see futurists organizations that will give you loads of information about the future. You know, we've got construction as part of our industry, so we are looking at what graphene construction means, you know, what will driverless cars mean, but what are the things when you're doing a bit of future gazing that really, really impact on what we think the leadership journey.

Will be in our organization and how are we going to develop our leaders to cope with those? And obviously, one of the things that I know many of you look at is generation and, when you think about generations that you've dealt with in the workplace, they probably fit somewhere between those. Those kind of middle three, we were talking about having five generations in the workplace a few years ago and thinking, well, you know, that's going to be years before that happens, but we're in there now.

You know, when you think about the veterans and the traditionists at the 70 to 80s, we've got 70 year olds in our organizations now and we've got these sort of very young people as well. So we've now got five generations at the moment in the workplace and that's bringing a whole range of challenges. As I've got older I don't like to think about the age sort of bands that go with these, you know when you move up a category in those sort of boxes and it becomes quite uncomfortable.

So they're just there for you know, for generalization. I do think that generation is a state of mind now. And as Henry did allude to that he and I met at a conference and Dominic there was there way back in France in 2000. It's actually an 18 to 30s holiday, if anybody asks, that's what we're claiming anyway.

So yeah, when you think about the differences in generation, what will that mean for your, for your leadership? We were having a discussion on our table earlier on and Rick on our table completely sort of might as well have read this slide out actually, which was about what is driving people now and what is wealth to them is changing enormously.

And if you look at a lot of the research around generation. We know that what actually people think of as wealth is not necessarily that pound sign anymore. It's a lot more than that. So thinking about what makes people people happy and it's not just about a CSR policy. And we all know that, you know, a lot of big industries have had corporate social responsibility policies for such a long time.

Organisations like us have been tapping into those and enjoying the fruits of those. But I think what people are really looking at now is something that feels that it's more embedded in the organisation. Has anybody come across an organisation called Escape from the City? I think it's escape from the city.

Yeah, you'll know what it is. It's an organization that are helping really high powered, effective, valuable professionals move out of their big corporate roles into roles in the in the charity, not for profit and third sector that have more purpose and more meaning because they've kind of lost their way a bit and they're feeling that they want something more.

And there's a number of organizations now that are That are specializing in recruitment to move people into more meaningful jobs. And that's again, you're thinking about people not necessarily thinking about the pound signs. Been on a something recently where I met somebody that's Andrea that runs a hospice in Cheshire.

And I said to Andrea, you know, she's talking me through her career journey. She'd been very big in marketing in the city. And I said, you know, how did you end up being CEO of the hospice? And she said, I had a life changing experience. I wanted more from life. It was not about the money. It was about something that made me feel fulfilled.

And I think you seem to come across more and more people now, where the driver is not necessarily money. So back to the generations. I think Kind of on the veterans and the baby boomers and a bit of the Gen X, We know those people quite well. We know what switches them on. They tell us we've worked with them for a long time. These are still people now, and there's some research I was reading, forgive me, it probably is in the references, I can't remember who the research was done by.

But it was saying something like, 48 percent of these people don't expect to retire now before the age of 70, whereas they probably would have been thinking between 60 and 65 before. And another 14 percent of those people said that they would be likely to carry on working over the age of 70. And these are the people that always thought they would retire around 60 between 60 and 65.

There's some interesting, wise people in that group. You've got valuable experience that we need to capture and nurture and continue to have in the organization, but we know quite a bit about those people. It's the people on the other side. The these youngsters that I wanted to give a bit of attention, attention to now.

You probably live with them as well. If you've got children and, or you may be, I'm just looking around the room now, assuming everybody's sort of similar age to myself and kidding myself, but, or you might be actually in some of these generations yourself, but it's that area I want to give a bit of focus to.

When I was developing my career, the main entrepreneurs that we knew about were Richard Branson and possibly Bill Gates. That was it really. In terms of role models, now there are hundreds of these guys and they're all very, very young. So you know, the, Brian Chesky is at the Airbnb founder Daniel Eck, the Spotify guy that set up Spotify and obviously Zuckerberg, mark Zuckerberg, all.

All extremely successful entrepreneurs in the tech industry, but all very young as well. So loads, and there are loads and loads more role models out now, out there now for people joining organizations that they aspire to. So it's not just Richard Branson anymore and it's not just just Bill Gates. There's definitely a rise in portfolio careers.

It'd be interesting if you've got, if you see this in your own organizations. What we're tending to see now is people where working for Bromford is absolutely part of their life, but it's not necessarily their only job. It might be their main job right now, but it's not necessarily their only job. And I was thinking around my own teams at the moment, and we've got people that are running fairly serious eBay business who does garden furniture and flexes her hours around running that.

We've got people that are doing wedding videoing weekends and for special events, we've got people who have got volunteering activities that they flex their time around and people are building much more of a portfolio career. The favorite, my favorite portfolio career is the woman that does my nails.

Yes, they do need doing so. Well, it's probably not a good thing to point out now because I've become very self conscious about them. But she also works for private detective's agency. I always think this whole thing on her CV from nail technician to private investigator is really quite a fascinating mix.

And she does quite a lot of volunteering around Alzheimer's as well in the middle of all of that. So, and if you think about yourselves, there's probably a number of you in the, in the audience that have more than one kind of a string to your bow and there might be really, really diverse.

It's not always about using the same skills. In the business is maybe that what people are doing as I call it on the side, which is becoming less on the side for a lot of people, and there were lots off. There's lots out there in in in the digital world to support that. So so task rabbit people might come across that people kind of.

Putting tasks out there for people to do and people literally buying the tasks off there or taking the tasks off there and being paid to do them. There's also people per hour, people selling their technical capability often around sort of some of the digital capability there, another way of earning money.

People make full livings out of just doing this, let alone it being something else alongside their job. Homejoy, now present in something like 38 countries, connects people with the domestic services as well you've got things like Airbnb, the largest, it's the largest hotel chain in the world and doesn't own a single hotel room.

And then you've got, obviously, Uber, the largest transport organization in the world that doesn't own a single vehicle. I think it's something like 40 million more profit than Delta Airlines. And, you know, it is simply doesn't own a single transportation vehicle in It's in entirety, so some very different ways now of people to connect with doing portfolio careers and particularly around that other side of the of that graphic we saw earlier on about the generations.

So there's a world of freelancers emerging and there's a world where part time jobs are the job of choice. And if you think very much at one time, part time was very much around commitments to care. It was childcare, maybe elder care. It was usually because people either work necessarily wanted to.

Progress their career or it was about caring. Whereas now what we're seeing is an arise of part time being a job of choice because people have portfolio careers. So when we think about our engagement with people and our commitment to things like succession planning and talent management, there's very, very talented people who might be part time in organizations absolutely through choice because they're doing other things.

I think that brings quite a different dimension. There's something else around speed going on for these people as well. Everything's really fast. You've only got to look at how products are funded through crowd sourcing to realize that these people are very used, particularly the millennials and the younger generations coming to our workplace, that things being really fast paced three of my favorite products off.

I think they were all on Kickstarter, but certainly on crowdfunding site are Goldie Blox. Which you may have seen in Toys R Us. Other, other retailers obviously are available. And they are a toy to get particularly to get girls into engineering, think about engineering and thinking about construction.

Lovely little invention that was funded through Kickstarter. The kite badge, which is about it's a mosquito repellent, which is saving millions of lives. In some of our poorer countries and then in one of my favorites, which I know will appeal to many of you pet owners out there, the disco dog which is a jacket that your pooch wears and should he roam too far from your smartphone, he will come up with a big flashing lost light.

We all know how much the pet industry is worth in this country, and it's a fantastic invention. In fact, someone on our table who's in the pet industry, I'm sure has a has an interest in it. Obviously, no good for a Kardashian, because it, you know, the dog doesn't come out the handbag. It's not really needed, but yeah, one to think about.

My dad goes wondering. I'm, I'm thinking I could perhaps get one for him, if we can get one fitted in Brian's size. So, but yes, it's the speed that these things are getting funded, really. When you think about that, why would young people want to join organisations? What's going to make them happy?

It's not going to be an organisation where there's masses of bureaucracy. We've done this to ourselves. Our own organisation in the last few years decided to put in, absolutely for all the right reasons, project functions, an innovation process, procurement. These are things that we used to just do before.

Perhaps living by the seaside.

Okay. Might want to scribble in your books. What's that list of stuff that would be on your, what makes you, you wealthy list? As I say, is it living by the seaside, riding your horse at weekends, going out cycling, whatever that might be for you.

You can be my lovely assistant Henry. Okay, we wonder if there's anybody.

Henry: Anyone to give a couple of examples of what came up?

Helena: Anybody up for sharing a bit? You're amongst friends.

Audience Member 1: Oh, thank you. What do I do with that? I'll give it back to you in a bit. Oh, I see. That's nice. I like that. Yeah. So I think I've had a long term plan to buy a smallholding after I moved out of London.

And we moved in a few months ago. The weekend we went and bought some cows. And I got up this morning to come up to this at My daughter, who's 11 months old, woke us up at about six o'clock this morning. And I looked out the window and there's a baby deer in the garden and there's another 10 on the paddock.

And it's like, you know, sunny day. Lovely. That's what it's all about.

Helena: Fab. I know Dom and his career in the past, you've also moved to be closer to the seaside and yeah.

Dom: Yes I have, and it's been lovely.

Helena: Great. Thank you.

Audience Member 2: It does actually scare me. I want to talk about the money thing. Cause I want to get it on the table or off the table, whatever. I believe that people are good and we're making a lot of changes in our organization based on the principle that people are good and people want to work.

And the top two points that Henry put up, get people to do what they are good at and give them freedom to do it well. I completely agree. Make them happy. I don't have a problem with it, but I think that's the more complex one. But I never have conversations with people about. How to enrich their lives or how to, you know, I only ever have conversations with people about how can they earn more money.

So I kind of understand it, but I'd really like to know what other people feel about this conversation because, forgive me, there's a danger when we're in a place like this that we get all kind of taken up with the idea of people are good, but I only ever have conversations with people about money.

Helena: What industry are you working in?

Audience Member 2: I mean, I work for a charter professional organization, so a professional body. So, People don't work there for the money. That's, that's certainly true. But, I still have a lot of conversations about salary.

Helena: Anybody, any thoughts on that?

Audience Member 3: Dear God I had a question to you. Do you believe yourself that, am I supposed to speak into this? Sorry. Do you believe that salaries that are on are fair or unfair? Because I think, Because often I find, in my industry, I run a language school. Sorry, I can't. I often find that I actually agree with them, with my staff.

When they say, could we earn more money? I work for a company that, or rather in private education sector, I don't think money is what you join a language school for. And I wish I could, and I wasn't, you know, empowered to do that.

You know, not give them loads more money, that's not what it's all about, but give them more so they feel that that threshold of being valued is met. So I just, I just had that question whether you actually believe that they're fair or not.

Audience Member 2: So, if I could just answer that, I do but I think every time you raise the barrier, they want it raised further.

And, and you never get out of that kind of, I don't see my way to get out of that cycle of always having conversations about money, so.

Audience Member 4: Hello. So, I'm a happiness researcher and I think part of the problem is that people don't really know how to articulate that and have that conversation. So people know they're not happy. So I think, well, I'm not happy. I should ask for more money. And so I think one thing is that people often don't know what makes them happy.

And because we don't talk about happiness in workplaces, people don't, I mean, people have freedom in my job. I want you to treat me better. I want you to give me respect. I want you to play to my strengths. I want to work in an office, which isn't full of Sort of just endless rows of boring desks that actually has some, you know, some plants and some pictures and all these sorts of things which people don't know how to articulate and don't think about.

And so they, I think they default to the money conversation, even though that's not necessarily what's really going on.

Henry: Helena, too. I know there's lots of people wanting to talk, but Do you want to finish off your...

Helena: yeah, one of the things it might be is to ask the question, I was at something the other day and they said, why don't you ask the question, how can, how can I be a better leader?

This was, but also cause this guy said he used to ask it with his kids every year, how can I be a better dad? And he said, they say, spend more time with us. And then he spent loads of time with them. And the next year he asked them, they said, don't spend so much time with us. So, but maybe there's something about how can this be a better organization for you, and asking some specific questions, not necessarily the answer, but maybe it's worth trying, but obviously there's loads of people with their hands up, in some of the connection stuff you do, might be worth following that up.

There's other drivers around now. There's our business drivers about being open 24 7. We're not a 24 7 organization ourselves at the moment, but I'm sure some of you are. That brings along lots of different work patterns for people. People's paths don't cross in the same way that they used to. And certainly with where we're having a very radical look at our, our accommodation at the moment, you know, I call it one of our fat and lazy resources.

We've got masses of office accommodation that we don't really need. And probably a lot of you are going through those processes. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see how that impacts on your engagement as people start to work together, necessarily physically less. Then obviously we need agile structures in our own organization.

Our new CEO, came in and decided to move all of the senior team around. These are mainly with the exception actually probably of only one individual have all come up through their functional silos. so they started in the business as a construction expert, and they're the director of construction, or they've started in development.

They're the director of development, they've starting HR, they're director of HR. And what she's done, he said, if actually, if any of you want to progress, I need you to be much more flexible than this. And I need to move you around. So I think it's really good in our own organization that she started from the senior team and said, you know what, go and do

that portfolio for a while. It has been quite hard for me personally because I've had to let go of communications, which has been quite a trauma and take on another part of portfolio. But it's very, very, you know, everybody will bring a fresh pair of eyes to a portfolio. So some interesting things going on, I think, around what work needs as well that will impact on engagement.

And I think alongside that, certainly, and what we've seen with young people is you don't necessarily need to work to a job title and a job profile or specifications. There's a bit here where HR legislation has gotta catch up with some of this. We want to make sure that to recruit people now that are much more about, you know, we want you to come and do this.

We might need a specialist skill, but actually in the future we might want you to do something different. Are you up for that? And somebody mentioned early on about designing processes around maybe someone going on to disciplinary or a capability. And we really have got to think about it from the other side is how can we provide things to be as flexible as possible and give people great opportunities?

Because actually a lot of these new people, particularly coming into the workplace are really up for doing some of that. You know, I'm teaching you to suck eggs here. Obviously, you know, since the Industrial Revolution, I can remember from school in the spinning jenny, automation has been taking over perhaps some of our lowest skilled jobs.

We've been experimenting with robot lawnmowers recently, and we've got a lot of landscapers. So, you know, let's see where that goes in the future. But I don't know if you've heard about recently about a product from IBM called Watson. Watson is a very sophisticated cognitive engine, really, and that, you know, they're saying can replace potentially board members and senior decision makers.

So if we think that some of this technology stuff is just going to replace some of the lower paid parts of our organization or perhaps some of the more repetitive jobs then actually the power is the person that can really program these things to make a difference. So. Just whizzing through a couple more minutes, is that okay to whizz through?

Just whizzing through what that's going to mean in change of changing skills and traits. I'll give these slides to Henry, so some of this stuff that I whizzed through you can see on there. Your job application and process recruitment process back in the Egyptian times is how many how many bricks could you haul up the pyramid?

You sat down with your quill in the Victorian times and did your IQ test. Took a long time for McClellan bought in competencies, but what smart organizations doing now is recruiting for potential and developing for potential. How they're actually doing it is quite difficult to find out, but I'm on that mission.

Certainly when I've, there's some part of research in Harvard in June 13, if you look at the Harvard business review, June 13, there's a really interesting piece on what is potential. And it comes down to these five different things and there's quite a lot that sits behind these. But if you think about your own.

Heh. What is it that, That sits behind that for you? And they also give another eight traits specifically around leadership, because they say, I'll give these to Henry, so that you can, You can have these. But there was another piece that I was particularly interested as well. When I've been looking at what are traits about potential?

Won't be a surprise for you to see emotional intelligence in there and social and creative intelligence, but linked to the product I was just saying about the Watson product from IBM, the ability to leverage artificial intelligence is becoming more important. A key trait to look for in potential, which I thought was really interesting.

I've not seen that on a, on a, on a list before. And there was also some specific traits been researching around creative talent and what the sort of traits that you would look for in creative talent as well. So what we're doing is looking at some of our recruitment processes, our development process processes around a people development process around these, these individual traits.

Have I got an overall strategy to show you on that? No, it's a journey that we're, that we're on. So right here, right now for us, what we're basing our leadership journey on is definitely trust. Again, we've talked about that this morning, no surprise there. Resilience because of the pace of change, let's stop talking about transformation and change programs.

It is just every day. So how do we build people's resilience to deal with that so that we can keep them engaged and happy? One of our biggest mantras for us now is there is no spoon. What we say to people in the organization is if you want something, help yourself to it. We push out masses of information, be as transparent as we possibly can be.

We blog, we vlog, we live stream board meetings. We provide news about four times a day on our intranet. We push masses of stuff out there. If people don't help themselves to that, then actually, we're going to push that back onto them and say, there is no spoon. If you want to engage better with this organization, tell us if there's something you're not seeing that you want to, but it is up to you to engage with us.

There's also, we want leaders that reality check. We don't want them sitting at a desk doing the day to day job. We see leadership as much more being out there on the front line, reality checking, removing barriers, and enabling people to do what they want. And coming back to what that hub spot, organization was saying it's about the leaders that really share their knowledge.

We need people that can manage people wherever they are as we move to a more dispersed workplace. There are some managers in our organization that are great leaders, but only if they've got everybody where they can eyeball them and only if they've got everybody in the same place at the same time on permanent full time contracts mainly.

They're not going to cope when we move to more freelancing way of working, more different types of engaging with contracts with us. We need multimedia communicators, so those people that say it's not for me, that's just not going to work for us in the future. If we're going to have a dispersed workforce, if we're going to have a range of generations, you've got to be multimedia.

And we need people that manage alumni, because as people move out and go and do their travelling that makes them wealthy, or go and work for another organisation that makes them wealthy, managing that alumni and that network of people to bring them back into the organisation at different periods of their life is going to be really, really important to us.

So we are no longer looking for just for leaders to be heads of specific families that are fairly stable. What we want is captains of the crew to take people on a journey. So when we've got a piece of work to do, we want our leaders to be able to go to pull together the right crew of people to go on that journey, disband it and then perhaps build the next crew to go on the next, deliver the next piece of work that could be freelancers, part timers, some full time people, consultants, whatever that might take.

So very different view and we want our leaders to be more like life coaches as we move forward rather than just the sort of traditional work coaching that we've done in the past. We're going to be measuring all this. Henry talked about measures. There's something we're going to be measuring with our customers around

are they achieving the goals that they set for the business? It's about our finances and looking healthy. This is not all fluffy for us. It has a bottom line when it comes to the overall value that we're providing to UK PLC. We've got some measures in place that show us what our value is there.

And then also, and I deliberately haven't used the word colleagues here, I think it's the people that contribute to the organization, whatever way they do, how we measure their engagement with the organization. So the question I leave you with is how are you building your leadership capability of the future to build the new world culture in your own organizations?

Thank you.