Involving you

We’re committed to working with residents to provide you with the best possible service. We do this through our resident engagement programme as well as a range of events, consultations, and feedback opportunities. Although most of our colleagues spent the year working remotely, we’ve continued to connect with residents online to hold resident meetings, events, and theme-based discussions.

36

resident events held (excludes Building Safety events)

30

residents on our Local Panels (London and Hertford)

1,283

residents took part in The Big Conversation

12

consultations and 2 surveys available to all residents

84

formally Involved Residents

Evolving our events and going virtual

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, we were determined to ensure our residents still had ways to connect with us and influence our services. We did this by holding residents’ meetings and events online using Microsoft Teams. We continued to share details by post and offered a telephone service for people who were not able to join us online, so they could still share their views.

Our online activities included:

  • themed discussion events with our Executive Leadership Team
  • resident scheme meetings
  • surgeries
  • resident mixers.

Although we know that holding events online is not accessible to all residents, it was still a great opportunity for us to hear from people who usually have difficulties attending in-person events and meetings. Moving forward, we will offer a blended approach of face to face and online events to hear from a diverse range of residents in the way they want to connect with us.

Key consultations

Anti-social behaviour (ASB) policy review

An opportunity to support residents by improving how we define which ASB situations we can respond to and those we’d need to refer to the relevant agencies. We also developed an ASB Toolkit and reviewed our standard template letters with the Resident Readers' Group. The reviewed policy and letters will be published in 2021/22.

Building Safety Resident Engagement Strategy

We consulted with residents on a new strategy to help us understand what information about building safety our residents value most. We received varied and contrasting opinions which we took into consideration when reviewing the strategy.

Focus group for future technology development and engagement strategies

Consultation to hear residents’ views about our creation of different resident personas that we would use to ensure we think of a diverse range of residents when shaping our services.

In the spotlight – The Big Conversation

We regularly share opportunities with residents to have their say on our services so we can learn and adapt based on their feedback. In line with the Tenant Involvement and Empowerment Standard, we carry out a resident consultation every three years.

As part of our survey this year, we not only took the opportunity to hear from residents about how they access our services, but we also informed them about support services they can access during challenging times. At the same time, we included a form for residents to update their information with us, so we have accurate contact details. We called this The Big Conversation. Across the two surveys, which were posted to 17,500 households, we had over 4,000 responses (1,283 for The Big Conversation).

From the responses, 583 people were interested in our involvement opportunities with 457 wanting to be contacted to find out more. 147 residents expressed interest to join an LGBTQ+ group. Our biggest challenge was having people take up the opportunities after being contacted, so we will continue to promote opportunities for people to be involved and share the successes of where the resident voice has helped to make a difference.

Looking forward...

We’re currently reviewing our Transparency and Resident Engagement Strategy using feedback from residents. We’ve taken the opportunity to create more flexibility within our strategy to support us in empowering the resident voice in the strategic decision-making processes of our business. We’ll do this by:

  • taking a blended approach to events
  • involving more residents to have a say in our services
  • encouraging a consistent approach to capturing and collating resident insight by creating a framework and toolkit
  • supporting resident-led initiatives and celebrating diversity in communities
  • providing resident wellbeing opportunities based on feedback from a wellbeing survey.