The customer voice is rising. The Social Housing White Paper – a Charter for Residents, the NHF Together with Tenants Charter and the NHF Code of Governance 2020, all point to a strong expectation of customer influence and presence on boards.
New regulatory requirements will follow in 2021/22, leading to a review of whether the customer voice is influencing and impacting on Boards/Councils, and whether the voice which is heard is representative of the customer base.
How we can help?
We have many years of experience in customer governance, from setting up tenant groups to scrutinise services; structures for resident engagement, training and development of board skills for tenants, including setting up 13 co-operatives.
Our work in tenant inspection and consumer and economic regulation, enables us to support your board and tenant committee structures from an structures, to set up, to development of the committee, through an independent critical friend service.
We can help you ensure a strong tenant voice in your strategic priorities and customer services, through our training and consultancy services.
Compliance checks
We can support you to complete a self-assessment against the requirements of the Social Housing White Paper, the current and developing expectations of Consumer Regulation and the new requirements for Registered Providers to meet the NHF Code of Governance on hearing and acting on the customer voice, its reach and diversity.
Alternatively, we can work with you and/or your tenants and residents, to complete the self assessment for you.
Creating a Customer Committee
We can advise on the many options open to you, for structures for tenant voice on boards and councils.
We can support you with advertising, recruitment, process and policy, pay structures, training and development plans for your new Committee.
The new style of customer committee takes many forms, whether reporting directing to a Board/Council or through a Committee. We support them in their many different forms.
Sustaining success
We can support the Committee to thrive by supporting the Committee meetings as a critical friend, or by supporting staff and Committee members to use the agenda and meeting time to achieve the greatest impact.
We can support you in the the delivery of a new style of governance, where customer voices can thrive and embed in your culture.
Developing Committee Members
We can provide individual mentoring from early support for new members, or for the Chair of the Committee.
We can deliver collective training and development plans to enable the Committee to be optimise effectiveness and to fully understand their role within governance structures. We can support the Committee to understand governance, regulation, value for money, regulation, new homes development, finance, housing policy and more, growing their confidence to contribute and act as a critical friend.
Facilitating away days
We can support your awaydays or board/council meetings to consider the many options for new structures for involvement which fit your organisation.
We can support you to understand what compliance and excellence might look like in your locality.
We can support you to consider digital options to triangulate the views of tenant groups, surveys and assurance data. We can facilitate your consideration of what great reporting on the customer voice might look like for your organisation.
Appraisals and effectiveness
We can support you to recruit, skills assess and review the work of the Committee by completing one to one appraisal with your chair and facilitating and reporting on individual and/or collective committee appraisals.
If things are going wrong and an individual member needs support, we can help you there too.