What Factors Make for Exemplary Gas, M&E, and Buildings Compliance Service

Operations Director James Quy discusses the key factors he believes are essential in ensuring you can be 100% confident, 100% of the time, that all your homes are safe for residents and meet the required standards.

The journey to compliance certainty starts well before any contract physically commences, a well-planned, efficient, and impactful mobilisation sets the bar for performance from the outset. James promotes a belief that executive sponsor ownership of the mobilisation ensures the team has the necessary resources and support. If you get the mobilisation wrong, you risk playing catch up for many months into the new contract.

Being properly prepared means setting the team up in the right place, with the right facilities, technology and data and many aspects of this can often be overlooked. An innovative and forward-thinking compliance team will need the space, not just to work efficiently but that creates an environment that encourages local collaborative relationships across all the teams and organisations involved.

The right blend of people with the right culture, behaviours and competencies is an obvious must. As is supporting those people with robust training, performance, and development programmes and continually creating opportunities to secure local talent from within the community each contract is serving.

In taking over an existing workforce into a new contract it is vital to treat every new person in the same way you would with your own long serving employees.

A key part of this is having an effective skills gap analysis to identify training and upskilling needs. If the workforce strategy if not completed comprehensively and promptly, this will very quickly become mission critical to contract success. The workforce strategy will be instrumental in improving workforce productivity, preparing the workforce with the new accreditations that will enable teams to work with new carbon reducing technologies with regular personal development and succession plans.

Should it be necessary to supplement a directly employed delivery model with supply partners to cover unexpected peaks or a specialist trade, strong onboarding and cultural alignment checks are crucial. However, what is even more important is recognising that whilst you may subcontract the work, you never subcontract ownership and accountability for the quality, records and assurances that go with that work.

James’s summary is in no way intended to be exhaustive. However, get these priorities sorted and you have every chance of getting things off to a great start. Ensuring all your homes are safe for residents and meet the required standards for human habitation.

For further information on ensuring homes are fit for human habitation and meet the required standards, please contact James Quy [email protected] or visit our resource centre.