We are committed to help organisations drive improvement through the EFQM Excellence Model, a comprehensive management framework used by over 30,000 organisations in Europe. To help you implement our Model, we provide training and assessment tools as well as recognition for high performing organisations. But our real talent comes from gathering good practices and integrating those within our portfolio. We at EFQM, a not-for-profit membership Foundation, aim to share what works, through case studies, online seminars, working groups, conferences and thematic events. Sharing our member s enthusiasm, their motivation and the results they achieve; that is what we work for. We would like to thank everyone at Glasgow Housing Association for their support in preparing this case study. 2
In line with our promise, to Share What Works, EFQM is a uniquely placed to identify good practices that have been adopted by our members. The EFQM Recognition Schemes, which involve independent assessors visiting applicants, help us to identify, verify and share these practices within the EFQM Members. In 2010, we launched the Good Practice Competition to enable any organisation, regardless of whether it is a member of EFQM or one of our Partner Organisations, to share an approach that works for them. The applicants are asked to upload a short video explaining their approach. A Jury of experts in the field then agrees on a short-list of finalists. The final judging process is a combination of a public vote, via the web portal, and the Jury s votes, after the finalists have presented their practice in more detail. The theme of the competition changes each year in line with the focus of the EFQM Forum; an annual event for business leaders and the excellence community to share ideas, experiences and knowledge. The concept of New Ways of Working has become synonymous with flexible working, virtual cooperation and even change management. Business cases for investments in new technology and business processes to enable flexible working tend to focus on cost reduction and increased productivity. But increasingly people are demanding greater flexibility in how, where and when they work - and this doesn't just apply to "digital natives". The competition was organised in association with the European Workplace Innovation Network, a project funded by the European Commission. Congratulations to the Winners of the EFQM Good Practice Competition 2013: 2013 Winner : Glasgow Housing Association, UK - Think Yes 2013 Highly Commended : Bursagaz, Turkey - Live Mobile and Be Socialised Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany - On the way to Enterprise 2.0 with Bosch Connect 2013 Finalist: Mutualia, Spain Lidera Project 3
Glasgow Housing Association (GHA) is a Registered Social Landlord (RSL), a not-for-profit organisation, a limited liability company, and a registered charity. We provide services to almost 67,000 people across Glasgow, owning and managing 41,000 rented properties. We are both the largest provider of social rented housing in Scotland. Since 2012, GHA has become the largest subsidiary of Wheatley Group, a new organisation formed to ensure a sustainable and growing business in the current environment. GHA s turnover is approximately 185 million per year of which 150m is generated through core housing, and 35m through other sources. Our leaders have set a clear direction through our vision of Better homes, Better lives, a Better Glasgow. Our core business is to rent properties to individual customers as their home and provide those customers with a range of property and neighbourhood services such as repairs, cleaning common areas and support services to ensure they have a nice place to live and can sustain their tenancy. As a Social Landlord, our priority is to provide housing to those in need, including vulnerable customers and those who would struggle to afford the private rented market or to own their own property. The role of Social Landlords in Scotland is defined in legislation and regulated by an independent Government body. We provide services through our Customer Service Centre (CSC), City Centre based shop and a network of community based offices, called Local Housing Organisations. We have approximately 1600 staff members across Glasgow, in 28 local housing offices and 2 corporate offices. Our key challenges include continuing to improve business performance through a poor economic climate, reducing costs to enable us to do more for our customers and invest in our assets and responding to welfare reform which is reducing our customers income and may make it harder for them to pay their rent. 4
Our Organisation is passionate about delivering a dynamic and comprehensive service to its customers and continually looks to enhance these services. There are many examples of changes that have been made with the specific purpose of adding value to our customers. For example, the creation of our Customer Service Centre which operates 24/7 where all routine enquiries are directed, freeing up time and allowing Housing Officers more time in dialogue with our customers. In order to meet the diverse needs of our client group, GHA recognises that change within the organisation is crucial and in order to deliver change, it is important to pay attention not only to the tools and business processes available, but to focus on equipping and enabling staff to make the change a reality. One of the major changes to be implemented is our Think Yes initiative, which following its success in 4 Pilot Offices, was rolled out across GHA in September 2012. Think Yes is about empowering our staff to make personalised solutions for each customer, using their initiative and professional judgement and resolving customer issues on the spot. Our staff take a great deal of pride in ensuring that any blockages for effective service delivery are removed and share these solutions with each other. As a result of Think Yes, staff have become more confident and continually strive to delight our customer which is reflected in the increase in customer satisfaction. 5
Our customers matter to us - we want them to be happy with the services we provide. While we had relatively high levels of customer satisfaction, we d set ourselves an ambitious target of delivering customer satisfaction of 90% or above by 2013/14. Research has consistently shown that high performing organisations have employees with high levels of satisfaction who are engaged with the organisation, its values and its strategy. To build this trust and confidence with our people, we have created our Think Yes culture. Think Yes is reflected in everything we do from our leadership and management approach through to the ways in which we manage our policies and processes. It is a mindset we empower all our people to adopt when serving our customers, with the role of managers and leaders becoming to realise the potential of their people and remove blockages that stop our staff being able to say yes at the first point of contact. We have systematically identified areas where staff have felt they have had to escalate issues for a management decision rather than resolve them themselves and we have sought to remove the reasons for these, both real and perceived. For example, staff were sometimes saying no to customers because they perceived that there was not adequate budget to deliver solutions or home improvements when actually, looking across budgets, solutions were easily affordable. To overcome this, our leaders have had a number of sessions with all front-line staff and put in place new ways of managing budgets locally. We have further aligned our operational staffing structures to better create an operating environment that will enable our staff to say yes. This has involved putting more staff on the front line and enabling them to make quick and personalised decisions for our customers at the first point of contact. We created clearer accountability for every housing officer for customers in their patch, and reduced layers of local management which significantly reduced staffing costs. An efficiency saving of 1.5million was estimated as a result of flatter structures. However, this has been exceeded and the actual saving was 3.4million. 6
This enabled housing officers to know, build relationships and add value to customers, as set out in our Customer Excellence and Better Lives strategies. We analysed all call handling that was happening locally through our Think Yes pilots and identified that over 70% of this was transactional in nature. Given this, we have now routed all customer calls through our Customer Service Centre in the first instance, making for a more efficient and effective service for our customers. All managers are now provided with advice and support to make Think Yes real for them, as we move away from our old style of management. This has included a new focus on management development at our monthly Managers forums and a dedicated leadership programme based on best practice in emotional intelligence. The evaluation has shown that this has opened managers minds to new ways of building positive relationships with staff and this, in turn, is leading staff to build stronger relationships with customers. GHA now has leaders who create the space through coaching and mentoring for staff to manage themselves and take responsibility and accountability for delighting our customers. The culture programme has been fully implemented across the organisation with all managers and leaders trained. We have had a range of sessions with staff with different formats used for different staff Groups. The Executive Team have held road shows, visiting every local office to understand how Think Yes was being implemented and whether there were any systemic blockages that meant our staff could not say yes. Feedback was that everyone was excited and on board with the direction and are looking for ways to make it happen and say yes to our customers. We ensure a consistent approach to providing and developing services through our vision of Better Homes, Better Lives, A Better Glasgow and the five big aims for our organisation which are: Deliver Excellent Services at every point of contact Provide and Maintain Quality Homes Empower Communities-Wellbeing and Opportunity Value for Money through innovation and joint working Empowering People to create a make-it-happen culture 7
We have defined a customer excellence strategy which sets out how we will reach 90% customer satisfaction by 2013/14, while continuing to reduce our overall costs. Think Yes creates a more efficient operating model both through shifting transactional service provision to our Customer Service Centre and (over the longer-term) online and through empowering our staff to deliver a right first time service that reduces failure such as complaints and repeat work. Think Yes further continues to build the trust and confidence of our staff with our organisation which, research shows, helps to improve performance. It further enables our locally based staff to get closer to the customer and build stronger relationships through demonstrating they can deliver on their priorities, very important for GHA as many of our customers are impacted by welfare reform. A major factor in Glasgow, particularly the communities we provide services to, is poverty. Compared to much of Scotland and the UK, we operate in many of the poorest areas with high unemployment, low mortality rates and poor health. Blanket standardised services don t cut it - our customers have very different needs which often need dealt with immediately. Think Yes has allowed us to deliver person centred services at the first point of contact. Customer profiling has been key to the success, the more staff know about the customer the more customers will assume that they know what they are doing. Systematic and structured consultation and research about our customers and communities has given staff the information they need to relate to each customer as an individual and provide personalised services. The level of communication across the organisation has provided emotional buy in and employees are more effective and positive, we share the vision of Think Yes. Our employees are more accountable because they assume responsibility for the overall effectiveness of the organisation. They see how they fit into the big picture and understand that their actions impact the entire organisation. Employees do make mistakes, but they learn from them and move on. 8
The Think Yes initiative was first introduced to GHA staff as a pilot project in four GHA offices in July 2011. It was piloted in four of our frontline teams, one from each geographical location north, south, east and west of Glasgow. Martin Armstrong, our Chief Executive, visited each office and asked staff to use their professional judgment to deliver what our customers wanted. Out went waiting for decisions from managers and in came quick action - at the first point of contact with customers. At this stage, we deliberately set no boundaries. Staff had to interpret Think Yes themselves and apply it in a way that suited their individual customers. Their only direction was to do what the customer wanted and to not break the law. Housing Officers were nervous at first but they soon found their feet. They spent more time with existing customers and established strong relationships with new customers. The experiments were a huge success with fully empowered Housing Officers thoroughly enjoying their new operational freedom; better engaging with existing tenants and establishing strong relationships with new tenants. Business performance improved, staff morale improved and there was no significant rise in local spend. The staff who were involved in the pilots became ambassadors for Think Yes in both the internal communications campaign and in the training sessions during Better Futures week, an event for all staff that launched Think Yes across GHA. Think Yes was introduced to the organisation in the February 2012 edition of Your News - our staff newsletter. This was followed by an internal campaign and Better Futures week in May. Initial communications set the scene explaining what had happened in the pilots and how it had improved customer satisfaction and, more importantly for our colleagues, how it empowered staff to make the right decisions. Better Futures week was the official launch of Think Yes for all staff. Groups of around 70-80 colleagues attended each session in our training Academy. Through careful scheduling and targeted communication, every member of staff attended one of the sessions. The Executive Team led every session. The question issued to all employees was why do we say no to the people who, (in paying their rents) pay our wages? Colleagues then attended smaller workshops where staff from the Think Yes pilots outlined the huge changes that had resulted from their experiments. It was an inspirational experience for colleagues. All staff were asked to go back to their roles with a new, Think Yes attitude. Managers participated in a three day development programme called Trust and Confidence in order to develop their skills and behaviours as Think Yes leaders. To maintain impetus our award winning Holmes intranet site has facilitated excellent communication across GHA. Effective, positive problem solving has been a key element of a Think Yes culture, communication is open and free flowing. There is give and take between teams and customers and effective listening which promotes solutions. 9
The programme was unusual in that there was no formal training before the pilot, staff had to interpret Think Yes themselves and apply it in a way that suited the customers best, it is about meeting individual needs and personalising services to meet them. Strict procedures and protocol at this stage would have stifled creativity so to make Think Yes work and delight our customers, staff are empowered to explore options to allow us to say yes. The key challenge was to convince staff that it was okay to say yes without asking permission. The role of our Chief Executive and Senior Team was key in providing that trust and confidence to staff. Many staff and managers were worried that Think Yes would present real risks to GHA and inconsistency in service. Quite the contrary happened - we never over spent our budget, our original trust in our staff and our customers paid off, our staff are happier our customers are happier and more than that we are positive about the way forward for the organisation. 10
Staff satisfaction across the 4 pilot areas has improved since Think Yes pilots mainly due to being able to say Yes to our customers (see table listed above) Staff feels more satisfied with their job in the Think Yes pilot offices (83%) Customer satisfaction levels are continuing to improve (87%) Staff satisfaction, following the organisation wide launch, improved across GHA (85%) Due to flatter structures at the frontline we have saved 3.4 million from our staffing budget Listed below are two stories demonstrating the impact of Think Yes for our customers and communities we serve: John Bill, Environmental Team Leader in the South Area was called to a customer s home one Saturday afternoon. The customer a mother of young children - reported broken glass in her garden. The customer had multiple sclerosis and was struggling to clean up the glass herself. John jumped in the van, taking his brush and shovel with him and had the garden cleaned in no time. The customer was delighted that the job was done within an hour of reporting it. Paul Watts from the mobile night team helped an elderly gentleman in Castlemilk who needed to have his old washing machine removed from his top-floor flat. The customer had a new washing machine delivered to his top floor flat in Dougrie Terrace but the delivery company refused to uplift his old one. The customer approached the night mobile team when they were removing bulk from his back court. The team not only removed the washing machine, they took it to the local scrap yard to be recycled and gave the cash to our charity of the year. 11
In October 2011, key staff from the four pilot areas met with Martin Armstrong and the other Executive Directors to give their honest feedback on the Think Yes pilot. This meeting was pivotal in the design process for the organisation-wide campaign. Feedback given by staff showed how embracing Think Yes transformed the customer/staff relationship. This, in turn, helped the organisation make the decisions which allowed Think Yes to take to be embedded across GHA. These were: Housing Officers to be key decision-makers Housing Managers to support staff in making decisions, removing blockages to thinking yes and helping staff develop in their role Re-organisation of support staff to better allow Housing staff to fully Think Yes The Executive Team then went out again in November/ December 2012 visiting all local teams to check that the deployment of Think Yes had been effective, including new front-line structures which underpinned the new ways of working. The feedback was that Think Yes had become part of the culture and that this was leading to services designed around the customer at the point of transaction. This feedback was recently played back through an external assessment for Customer Service Excellence, the UK cabinet office s standard for customer service, and through Investors In People, where GHA received the Gold standard. 12
The objectives of Think Yes are to: Improve customer satisfaction levels by asking staff to think positively when faced with a customer request or problem Improve staff satisfaction by empowering them to make decisions for customers and promote ownership and trust Put more staff on the front line enabling them to make quick decisions for our customers at the first point of contact Get to know, build relationships and add value for our customers, as set out in our Customer Excellence and Better Lives strategies Deliver personalised services to meet individual need Streamline more efficient operating structures designed to generate savings which can be reinvested in further improving customer experience As can be seen in the results section, we have met these objectives, our customers and staff are more satisfied with quality of service and our staff are more motivated, feel valued, are proud to work for GHA and are satisfied with their job. This has been a resounding success; research has proven that happy, motivated staff with a positive attitude are far more productive. 13
This table shows how people satisfaction has improved in the four Think Yes pilot areas from a PULSE survey conducted a couple of years ago: Pulse Survey Think yes offices (%) I feel valued for the work I do 48 66% I feel motivated to do a good job 60 82% I plan to be working at GHA in 12 months time 87 94% I would recommend GHA as a good place to work 70 88% How satisfied are you with your job 69 83% I am proud to work for GHA 79 86% Overall in our most recent independent staff survey people satisfaction has again increased this year to 85%. In terms of the impact on customers our customer satisfaction levels continue to improve as Think Yes is embedded across the City of Glasgow. 14
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