Shrinking Resources, Growing Expectations: Time to Focus on Productivity

Productivity is coming into sharper focus in social housing. The way that homes are maintained are being squeezed by conflicting pressures of tighter funding and growing expectations.

Within social housing repair and maintenance, we need to invest in improving the stock while keeping on top of repairs and compliance issues. Meanwhile, residents quite rightly demand the standards of customer service that they’ve come to expect in other areas of their lives. And all of this has to be delivered within the constraints of tightly regulated rental income.

Improving productivity is the only way to reconcile these competing demands. To improve productivity, we have to address four key challenges:

• Focusing on the needs of the asset rather than being purely responsive.
• Delivering integrated IT solutions that improve efficiency and transparency.
• Improving integration between teams.
• Turning data into usable information that can inform planning and evaluation of performance.

Reactive or Planned Maintenance?

Repair and maintenance provision is too often driven by resident demand. Being responsive is a good thing but being predominantly demand-led isn’t the most productive way to deliver the service.

This is where information becomes powerful. Once we have a detailed picture of assets, their condition and their performance we can start the journey to creating a less reactive, more asset management-based service. Few social housing providers would have the resources to develop the necessary information management systems independently but working with a substantial partner effectively spreads the cost.

Better Service Through Technology

There’s a similar argument with customer contact and scheduling systems. The Osborne system allows residents to interact with the R&M team on any device without being constrained by office hours.

We have an integrated suite of applications covering customer contact, CRM, diagnostics, workflow, scheduling and billing. It makes the entire customer handling and work scheduling process more efficient and has been developed using our experience across multiple R&M partnerships.

The One Team Approach

We know that some residents are heavier users of repair and maintenance services than others – in some cases much higher. If this situation isn’t managed effectively it can skew service delivery and make it less effective overall. It can also mean that equally deserving but less demanding residents miss out.

To understand what drives this behaviour and to change it, we need to work collaboratively with clients teams. s. Integrated working with partners also helps with compliance, particularly when dealing with ‘access refused’ issues. Without a one team approach, these issues can be very time-consuming.

All of this underlines our core belief that improving productivity isn’t a question of working harder. It’s down to working differently and more collaboratively.

Carol Bailey, Managing Director – Osborne Property Services