Introducing Futures Housing Group (FHG)
Futures Housing Group (FHG) is a medium-sized housing provider, managing around 10,000 properties across the East Midlands. With a workforce of approximately 450 people, it operates a hybrid model with some staff office-based, some working remotely and some working out of maintenance depots across their operating areas.
Their main focus is supporting tenants and maintaining homes across the region, with a customer-first attitude to everything they do, Futures Housing lives by a core vision of providing quality homes and services for better futures.
The organisation had seen substantial change at board and executive level, including a new CEO and refreshed leadership team.
Culture had always been high on the agenda within the organisation however with recent changes within the leadership team they decided it was a good time to truly assess their culture and test some long-held assumptions about their culture and the differences between their teams.
There had long been a belief that the organisation’s culture was aligned with its values, however there seemed – based on anecdotal evidence – that there was a different culture among office-based teams when compared to remote staff.
By engaging a Cultiv8tiv culture assessment FHG were able to truly understand the feelings of their team and have been able to map and plan culture transformation projects that will help align culture amongst their different teams.
Previous engagement surveys providing incomplete picture
With a strong focus on culture and an understanding that their key goal of delivering excellent customer service is intrinsically linked to their organisational culture, Futures Housing had run annual engagement and pulse surveys in the past.
These engagement surveys were often time consuming (with senior leaders waiting up to 8 weeks for reports) and often left the organisation feeling they were not getting a complete picture or were unable to act on the findings.
Previous reports lacked direction and didn’t offer the depth they needed to inform real change, instead they often just plotted differences year on year without any of the ‘why’ behind their results. This meant that the engagement surveys they’d conducted could not inform culture change projects as there was no insight or reasoning behind the results.
How our culture assessment helped
The Cultiv8tiv AI powered culture assessment offered a much deeper level of insight than FHG had received from previous employee engagement softwares. It provided rapid results and crucially, it came with a detailed narrative to help focus their attention and put in place the culture change actions that will make a real difference to staff and, ultimately, their customers.
From the findings, FHG was able to work from fact and not assumption. Armed with the depth of detail in a Cultiv8tiv assessment the leadership team were able to make strategic decisions based on clear data.
Previous change projects in the organisation had sometimes been difficult, with managers and other staff resistant to change however – armed with the data and not working on a general feeling in the organisation – the senior leadership team were able to map out six clear internal projects that were backed up with clear data and, as such, are difficult to block.
These six tangible internal projects, three being implemented this year, and three planned for the next, are designed to align the whole organisation’s culture and create a more consistent experience for all staff, regardless of location.
Actions and next steps
Using our culture assessment, the leadership team at Futures Housing are better placed to make and defend strategic decisions. With cultural insight to back them, they can challenge previously held assumptions and overcome internal blockers to progress.
Nicola Hope, Group Director at Futures Housing, said:
“Our culture is the linchpin for everything we do. Our key goal is to deliver excellent customer service and that our customers really get what they need from us, and they get it without effort. The main driver for that goal is culture.
“We have run culture change projects in the past and we regularly run employee engagement surveys but they never give us actionable insight into why we have the scores we have. With Cultiv8tiv we received a level of data and a depth of insight we hadn’t received before and being armed with these facts and figures we’ve been able to remove previously placed blockers on implementing positive change that benefits all of our team members so that we can focus on what’s important, delivering excellent customer service.”