How Does It Feel To Be A Times Top 100 Company?

We’ve been sitting on some excellent news recently and in this digital age when all it takes to announce something to the world is a quick tweet or a speedy blog post, it’s been difficult to keep it to ourselves. The news? Well, Trafford Housing Trust was recently named as the 22nd Best Public Sector Company To Work For according to The Sunday Times Top 100 list for 2011. Last year we were ranked 65^th, so it’s genuinely delighting that we’ve made such progress in a year.

The official handover

One of the real values of this award is that it’s based on questionnaires sent privately from an organisation called Best Companies to our staff who then return it directly to Best Companies, so we have nothing at all to do with it. We were graded as a Two Star Organisation (up from One Star last year) and we were ranked a very laudable 22nd. Perhaps most impressively of all our managerial team ranked as the third best managerial team overall.

So aside from the fact that it makes nice reading, why is this news that brings a smile to the face you see above? Two main reasons.

The first thing is that the organisation views its managers so positively. There is lots of evidence, including decisions I have made during my own career, that staff leave managers, not organisations. If you want to keep hold of your best staff then you need people to love, and be loved by, their manager. From what our people told us this time, it seems we’ve got that situation and that gives us a fantastic chance of keeping our most talented individuals. And resources are tight at the moment, I know it’s not that managers have been making staff happy by giving out big pay-rises, it shows that they’ve succeeded by doing the right things, day in and day out to motivate their teams.  

The second reason it makes me delighted is that there is such a huge congruence between the criteria used by Best Companies to assess organisations and our organisation’s values. Our values are the key to everything we do at Trafford and this result gives me huge confidence that putting values first and everything else second is not only the right thing to do, but that it's working. When new staff first start at Trafford Housing Trust they get a card with our values printed on them. I also meet them and tell them that the card should be next to their bed so it’s the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing they see at night. Usually people laugh nervously and wonder what on earth I'm on about! But they soon see that we really do take the values seriously. I’ll give a more concrete example of this in a future post.

As is right and proper we celebrated at the awards which were made at a dinner with over 1,300 people present. We met up with a number of other housing associations and I really enjoyed raising a glass (or perhaps two!) with a team from the Trust who had all worked to achieve the success. All of us are under no illusion that this means our work is done and we can sit back and relax for the rest of our careers - I'm sure 2011 still has plenty of challenges, but it was nice to have one night dedicated to celebrating their excellent work and achievements.

As a final thought, the amusing Bill Turnbull from BBC Breakfast was hosting the event and talking about how as part of the BBC’s relocation to Manchester he might be looking for rooms soon, have a look Bill and let’s talk.