Everyone Wins with Active Resident Engagement

Whatever type of service you offer, it clearly makes sense for the users of the service to be fully engaged with how it is delivered. It seems hard to imagine how you could direct money and resources effectively if this doesn’t happen.

Yet, research shows that when it comes to repair and maintenance, residents often don’t feel part of the decision-making process and are passive recipients of whatever service is on offer. This isn’t the way forward.

Social housing repair and maintenance is (or should be) much more than a commercial relationship between a local authority or housing association and a contractor. Just the word ‘contractor’ conjures up the wrong kind of image. When social housing works well, it is a partnership with residents at the heart of it.

Benefits of Engagement

With finite resources and so many priorities, the natural desire is to feel that you have as much control as possible. It might not seem obvious at first but giving residents a stronger voice increases rather than diminishes the level of control. For one thing it allows resources to be concentrated on things residents value most and avoids wasting time and money on things that have less impact.

Residents have first-hand experience and are best placed to give us the qualitative input on the effectiveness of the repair and maintenance service. This goes alongside data to give a complete picture of how well the service is working for all stakeholders.

Active resident engagement and involvement saves money by enabling more efficient and better targeted services to be delivered.

Whose Needs?

The fundamental question for all repair and maintenance partnerships is whose needs are they shaped around? Councils and housing associations have needs around efficiency, compliance and accountability. Residents have needs around convenience, customer service and responsiveness. And everyone has needs regarding quality, safety and environmental standards.

What shouldn’t drive decisions is the needs of the contractors’ shareholders.

Shaping the Service

Osborne isn’t on a mission to sign up as many repair and maintenance contracts as we possibly can. What motivates us is to work with social landlords to design and deliver services that meet residents’ needs.

Our commitment includes spending the time and effort to understand what residents want from their repair and maintenance service and investing in the right people and IT systems to deliver a service that residents value.

Since investing in our IT solution in 2012, we’ve seen ‘right-first-time’ rates increase by 5% and customer satisfaction increase by 9%, in partnerships that deliver an efficient and responsive 365//24 service across diverse geographical areas.

The details of each service delivery may change, but the one constant is the fact that residents are always at the heart.