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.

A Day In The Life

The M53: How most days begin...

One of the most frequent questions I get is what a typical week is like, so here’s a snapshot of a standard day.

As mentioned in an earlier post it's quite difficult to define exactly what my role is as a CEO because you have to have at least an awareness of every element of the organisation. Of course the balancing act is to make sure that while you have a good overview, you are not trying to do everything within the organisation.

05.40I always try to start Monday early and this week was no exception. 05.40 alarm, straight into sports kit and a very familiar fifty mile trip down the M53 and M56 to Trafford – this morning the fact I’d had the car brakes done the previous weekend really showed, although thankfully no emergency stops needed. The journey itself is spent listening to the radio or often putting various thoughts in order so that I know what I'm thinking about when the working day begins.

07.15By seven I’m at the Leisure Trust in Stretford and on my bike by the time the spinning class starts at 07.15. James works us all hard for 45 minutes and then shower, change and I’m in the office, raring to go by...

08.32

First up, it’s a meeting with the Chief Executive of VCAT – the umbrella body for voluntary sector organisations in Trafford. They’ve got some challenges ahead as they have a key role in making the Big Society work, but in an era of cuts, have no certainty about their own funding. There’s a paradox for the policy makers.

10.00Two hours into the day and the second of several meetings. This one involves the key players on Trafford’s housing scene come and plan the final details of a partnership conference that we are hosting. It’s a challenging time and we feel pretty pleased by the end that there’s going to be an interesting and challenging agenda for the 50 or so people due at the conference.

11.38Just half an hour after that finishes before our fortnightly Executive Management Team meeting and I squeeze in a session with one of my Directors. At the moment I’m asking all the senior team to “give it to me straight” about what they’d like me to do differently. The most consistent things to come out so far are to stay focused and make sure there is greater rigour and vigour about keeping everyone on mission to drive up performance. It's an interesting challenge!

12.14Spurred on by my discussions with the Directors I chair the EMT meeting with more vigour and rigour! And as we finish half an hour earlier than the allotted time I have a moment to do some emails and post. Then it's into a briefing session with the wider leadership team to brief them on the key things to have come out of EMT.

How Monday's usually end.

16.00 As soon as that finishes, we all get a briefing on the Sunshine event that is due to take place later in the week. This starts with our HR Director Elaine telling the assembled company that there’s not very much for them to do this time, before revealing the reason – I have to do three consecutive 30 minute briefings to about 120 staff at a time – so basically I’m doing all the work!

16.50And by now, with the clock ticking round to 17.00 I’d ordinarily be on the badminton court near home by 6pm.

It’s a men’s four and we’ve been playing together for about 15 years and its one of the things that keeps me sane! Thrashing a shuttlecock around is the best stress reliever I know. But this week, two of the guys can’t play, so the day ends with a wander round the building and a few casual chats, followed by a last clearance of emails.

Could The Big Society Bank Change Our Communities?

One of the ongoing criticisms of the Big Society is that it lacks definition. As mentioned in a previous post I’m cautiously optimistic about the philosophy itself, but I thought it might be interesting to show one way in which the Big Society could have a genuinely big impact on funding within the community. This is sketched out in back-of-the-envelope figures so don’t take me to task on the numbers in this post! It's just a way of showing that at least in theory there are changes afoot.

Oh.

For Trafford Housing Trust there is roughly £700,000 of funding each year that goes through our Community Panels - which are about local people making decisions for their neighbourhoods. If we look at the Big Society Bank we could start to imagine what size loan this would produce if instead of thinking of that money as a single yearly amount, we looked at it as being the repayment of interest and principal for a loan. Suddenly, rather than having a single yearly figure of £700,000 then you’ve got a five or six yearly lump sum of £7-10 million. 

What could we achieve with that level of Big Society funding?

Take an example of a community centre. One that's tired and needing money spending on it and then once refurbished, likely to run at a loss for some time (indeed if ever) before it is able to support itself from paid-for activity. If you had a system where you used part of our Community budgets to repay a loan that would do up (or possibly even build the centre itself) and it was partly used to run the community centre in the right way on a diminishing level of subsidy against an agreed business plan, then you’ve got a very different model for use of that money than just putting up some railings or making some car parking spaces.

Could the Big Society Bank go one step further?

There are two other factors that make this switch in funding interesting. The first is if you factor in social impact bonds. For the uninitiated this is a form of payment by results stream. It might be that you say that you want to start a community project and the impact of it will reduce a set social issue by x%. That improvement will save the government £y million per year, so they promise me that money if I achieve it. When I’ve got that promised income stream I can then use it to raise money from a bank. However, if I don’t achieve that result then I still have to make the payments on the bond. Add in the proceeds from a social impact bond and our initial £700,000 of funding per year has now become a very significant sum of money indeed.  

Then we factor in another element based on the simple truth that success goes to success. If we wanted to attract philanthropic money, or go to large companies and get access to their Corporate Social Responsibility money then these are sources of funding that like to see success. Naturally, they’re not going to want to throw money after projects that fail or don’t make much impact. Like it or not – "iconic" projects are one of the things that they like. Getting something off the ground with large capital investment is intriguing because it enables you to go to philanthropists and CSR money and say look what we’ve achieved – with your money we could double this, or replicate it somewhere else – suddenly you’ve got even more community centres.

So how does this relate to the real world? What could you build? Sale West is a great example. There’s a community centre there that’s been fragmented into at least four and – I’ve had two meetings already on this and I still don’t truly understand how it’s set up – potentially five or six management regimes - so the building isn’t managed effectively. When the Sale West estate was built there wasn’t a church and the church there uses the centre on a Sunday. They would like to build a church and their view is that instead of it being a community centre that the church is able to use, that there should be a church that is also community centre with the two spaces both working for each other. Now that means doing something quite ambitious to the site, something which would require significant funding, something perhaps that the Big Society Bank could do. How's that for definition?