Tony Williams - Group Director of Organisational Development
It has been a funny couple of weeks. At this time of year there is always a feeling of ‘holiday fever’ in the air and, of course, the fact that there are less people about! My time seems to have been spent mainly on the Reward and Performance Programme, the Orbit Academy and the next stage of the Growing Our Leaders Programme.
Trying to sort out the new approach for our pay has been difficult, given the changes suggested by my GET colleagues which meant a rethink of our approach and a lot more work benchmarking the large number of different job roles we have across Orbit. The work on providing flexible benefits has also proved to be far from straight forward! This has involved working closely with our finance colleagues and our new external partner, Thomsons (the market leader in benefits), to clarify what we want, when we want it and what it will cost. The really great thing to come out of this is that, although none of us realised it, we have a very good set of benefits already and that we need to make clear to all our people what these are and their value to us.
The Orbit Academy is now launched and we are working to expand this to cover our people, board members and residents. I have had various meetings with people over the last couple of weeks including Just Housing, Coventry University and the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). The exciting development with the CIH is the development of a Customer First training approach (the ‘Orbit Way’) which will cover how we deliver great customer services across Orbit. This will be based on the Orbit ‘stories’ of great customer service and involve residents fully in the training.
Creating great leaders should be a fundamental goal for every organisation. As you may know, we have a Growing Our Leaders Programme at Orbit which covers our senior, middle and first line managers. This programme has been endorsed by the CIH and I have been working on the next stage of that development. I have been looking at how we can get our managers at whatever level to first ‘shape the future’ and then be able to ‘build the future’. This means some hard work by us all on how we create, deliver and grow the changes that are needed.
I think a big challenge for us all at the moment is how we take on the Government’s ‘Big Society’ and localism agendas. In Orbit it strikes me that we have a real opportunity to be a market leader in these areas, particularly because this will mean putting our residents at the forefront of those developments. I know that work is going on across Orbit at the moment to see how we improve our engagement with residents, but to me how we ‘step up’ to really embrace and provide a lead for the sector will be crucial.
Talking of ‘big challenges’ I will be off to Malawi in mid September to finish off (or finish me off!) the school’s project a group of friends and I have been working on. We have raised about £40,000 over the last 14 months and this has been spent on building classroom blocks, a teachers’ house and feeding station/pre-school facility at the Namanyanga School. The final ‘cutting of the ribbon’ to open all the facilities will be when we are out there – plus playing the football match against the local community. If you are interested to learn a bit more about the project the website is www.project4africa.co.uk
Hopefully see you all when I am back!
Tony
