Tower Homes - Engaging employees to change other people’s lives

Having won The Sunday Times Best Small Company To Work For (2006) award, Tower Homes knows a thing or two about engaging employees. Here, the company shares some of the secrets of its success. By Steve Walker, chief executive, Tower Homes.

How do you get a competitive advantage? We are asked to do more for less, achieve ever-greater efficiency – better, faster and cheaper are the watchwords. It’s a tough old world. So any tool to get more out of people must be a boon you would have thought.

Employee engagement is (rightly) becoming acknowledged as a valuable business tool to improve the bottom line. For the already enlightened it has unlocked the huge discretionary effort that lies in all of us. For others, employee engagement can seem too much like hard work – similar to pushing a pig up a ladder. Unnatural, and a bit too difficult!

What is it that encourages some of us to love our jobs and put that extra 20 per cent effort in – that amount of effort that takes organisations from good to great? Could you do with getting more out of your staff? Would it give you a competitive advantage? And do you love your job? You can hardly ask your staff to love their job if you aren’t showing them the way.

Perceived wisdom suggests that it isn’t monetary reward that engages people – so how do some companies achieve high levels of engagement, demonstrably improving the bottom line?

Tower Homes has achieved real buy in, becoming The Sunday Times Best Small Company To Work For (2006). The organisation has created a level of people engagement that has seen it become multi-award winning, recognised as ‘best in class’ in its sector. We are not high fliers or especially gifted – but we obviously have some gold dust. And as it is just you, dear reader, I think I can afford to share that gold dust. I hope this article will show that employee engagement is good for business. It is common sense, but doesn’t seem to be common practice.

Tower is a part of the L&Q group, a housing association providing homes for people unable to afford market housing. L&Q owns and manages 50,000 homes in London and the south east, builds 1,400 homes a year and employs 1,000 staff. Although a charity, the group’s assets total £7bn. L&Q were the first housing association to enter The Sunday Times Best Companies list five years ago and reached the dizzy heights of 12th place in 2005.

Housing associations, until fairly recently, were seen as once removed from council housing and therefore not particularly glamorous. This has affected recruitment – not many people wake up and think their dream is to have a career in the affordable housing sector. So, The Sunday Times awards have certainly helped the group improve the calibre of its staff. Most associations are charities and part government funded, but have neither public nor private sector status. Pay is average. So, not too promising thus far! However, once you are in the housing world, it is like a bug. What we do changes people’s lives – every working day, L&Q houses a dozen homeless families or helps first-time buyers achieve the dream of owning a home. We don’t sell insurance, we don’t make biscuits or widgets – we fundamentally change people’s lives.

So once we have snared an unsuspecting new recruit it pays to keep and train them in the ways of the dark side.

L&Q has eight operating divisions, with Tower helping first-time buyers and key workers such as teachers, nurses and police officers. Tower employs just under 100 staff. In The Sunday Times 2006 awards the organisation won six of the eight categories and received a special best work-life balance award (84 per cent positive). In 2007, Tower became the only association of its type to receive three stars from the Audit Commission. It was also the first to be awarded the Charter Mark for excellent customer service, the first to win major design awards and has subsequently walked off with a host of other industry awards. Tower’s performance is regularly top of the benchmarks. Within L&Q, Tower returns 40 per cent of the annual surplus despite being 15 per cent of group turnover and ten per cent of staff.

Something positive is obviously going on and there is a difference at Tower – even within the same group. We have the same corporate values, same corporate-planning processes, strategies and policies. L&Q is one of the top associations in the country. Yet in a recent staff survey, Tower’s employee engagement figures were significantly higher (see Figure 1).

So what makes the difference to the way people at Tower feel and are there clear business benefits to getting people to love their job? How hard have we worked and is it worth it? What is different at Tower? Is there anything we do that you could do?

At Tower, we spend an enormous amount of time ensuring every member of staff feels valued and knows they can make a difference. The business-planning process is extremely intensive and involves every member of staff. Everyone from the receptionist downwards knows where he or she fits, where their team fits and where Tower is going. The business plan isn’t the preserve of management – it is completely owned by the staff. After all, it is their future.

The glossy brochure at the end of the process has their photo in it. It is a live document, used at one-to-one reviews, six-monthly and annual appraisals, and team meetings. Everyone buys in. It is a simple, comprehensive and uncomplicated way of engaging. But this is just the start.

We start by making sure that the vision is simple and something that everyone can remember – ‘To be number one in everything we do’. Now that is simple and not easy to forget. We gear everything that we do and say – particularly our communications strategy and the way we coach our staff – to never accepting average, never walking past a quality problem and having a positive, can do outlook to make us number one.

Then we focus on four main areas:

§          Culture and attitude;

§          Communication;

§          Celebration;

§          Coaching.

Culture and attitude

Culture and attitude are everything. We focus on creating a positive, can do, solution-oriented culture. People are encouraged to take personal ownership and responsibility. We create the conditions for people to love their job – because if you love your job, you have more passion, more energy – which usually brings better results and is more enjoyable. Your customers see a difference and satisfaction rises. Average customer satisfaction in our industry is 74 per cent, but at Tower it is 89 per cent. However, this is still not good enough for us.

It has taken five years to get everyone focussed on having a positive first response and attitude. Try it for a week, not just at work but at home – particularly when your teenager is behaving like a teenager. Being positive all the time takes enormous energy, especially when things aren’t going to plan – much more energy than being negative. But, when everyone at Tower is pointing in the right direction, the energy is awesome and results seem to flow along with improved staff and customer satisfaction.

We look for ways to layer a positive attitude and cement the culture. We have a raft of benefits and rewards – good leave entitlement, pension and all the usual things you would find in a sector like ours. But the ones that people really appreciate are those that overtly show that managers actually care, such as our employee of the quarter award (£100 cheque and a photo in reception) and annual outstanding achievers awards, where up to ten per cent of the work force receive two and a half per cent of salary and a gold badge. Try taking that badge away from them. All outstanding achievers appear on stage in front of their 1,000 group colleagues to rapturous applause, photo and handshake with the CEO – public recognition. It might seem small beer to companies that give huge bonuses, but remember we are a charity and part publicly funded. These rewards are simply part of the recognition process.

We have a host of other small merit awards, grandparents leave (my favourite), adoption leave, infertility treatment leave and a day off if you are not sick during the year. You might be surprised how many people want an unblemished record on sickness and absence. Industry sickness runs at over four per cent, while at L&Q it is just over two per cent. At Tower it is one per cent. There is a clear business benefit here – because we have so few people off sick, we don’t use agency temps. Average staff turnover in the industry is around 18 per cent – at L&Q it is 15 per cent, while at Tower it is just eight per cent. With the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) assessing the cost of hiring someone at £8,000, I make that a £64,000 recruitment saving at Tower. Since being in The Sunday Times Top 100, L&Q has saved more than £100,000 a year on recruitment because more and better calibre people want to join us.

Culture and attitude is a year round thing. At Christmas we screen a feel good film with popcorn for the staff while the directors man the phones. Last year it was the weepy ‘It’s a wonderful life’, which had half the staff in tears. This year it will be ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ (see, always planning ahead). We also encourage sports and charity events – anything to layer a positive, team building, inclusive culture. On top of all this we have regular get-togethers to help break down the inevitable departmental barriers that exist in most growing organisations.

To further foster an inclusive culture and attitude, Tower set up a ‘People Management Group’ (PMG) for directors, managers and supervisors. The PMG is used as a way of spreading and reinforcing corporate messages and to share ways of making employees’ lives easier. Managers are the crucial people – they are the bridge between real life and senior management, so it’s vital that our PMG members live and breathe Tower’s principles and values, and set very high standards with passion and energy.

Communication

I guarantee every staff survey will show that ‘communication should be better’. Ask staff what that means specifically and it is like nailing jelly to the wall. We take the view that regular communication is vital if you have gone to the effort of fully engaging with staff on the business plan. Communication is another tool to help flesh out culture and attitude. But it is a two-way thing. Our staff survey in 2003 indicated that some staff felt pressured and under stress, while others felt pay had fallen behind. We published all the survey results – no hiding.

We engaged with an on-line health and well-being programme, allowing staff to complete confidential questionnaires in areas such as sleep, diet, exercise etc. This showed that staff were not drinking enough (water, dear reader) or taking enough exercise. So, we put in water coolers with branded Tower water bottles and encouraged team-building events such as football, netball and charity walks/runs. On pay, we agreed some salaries had fallen behind and we paid more – linking increases to productivity increases. Our 2006 survey results showed 20 per cent increases in satisfaction in these two areas.

We have the usual raft of communications, but we also publish minutes of directors meetings – nothing to hide. We set out every complaint received, demonstrating that the management team is not defensive. Every complaint is aired setting out lessons learnt, suggested improvements and whether the customer was happy. Last year, 18 complaints led to direct improvements to our services. This can be viewed as free business consultancy.

You may already be exhausted at the thought of putting so much effort in. But this is only scratching the surface. We invest in extensive communication because getting people trained, clued up and making them aware that they work in a supportive, progressive and caring environment adds to the bottom line. Absence and staff turnover are down, training costs are down (we still spend three times the national average), while productivity and the bottom line are up. So it works for us – but there is a cost. It’s a hearts and minds thing.

Celebrate

We will celebrate the opening of a door. What good is it if you don’t reflect on what you have done with pride? We don’t go overboard, but we make sure that we recognise when teams, individuals or the company have done really well – we try to make it very public. It is a form of communication and it layers culture and attitude.

When Tower won The Sunday Times Best Company award, a dozen managers got back to the office at around 2am and spent the next hour and a half blowing up balloons, attaching them to a bottle of champagne and chocolates for every member of staff, so that when they came into the office the next day they were welcomed by a sea of balloons.

We are serial award winners, but we make the most fuss of individuals – the honest Joe’s of the company who go about their jobs making Tower what it is. Out of nearly 40 awards, I have only ever personally accepted one (The Sunday Times) and even then I took my whole team of 20 on stage. That’s not me being saintly – it is just that chief executives rarely do any real work and it is much better for the staff that do the work to get the recognition.

Coaching

I probably shouldn’t use the word coaching, but I wanted to keep to the four aces. I just didn’t want to use the word management. I do not like to think we manage people. If we have the right people with the right attitude, skills and training we won’t need to manage tightly, just coach.

But Tower does not have a high-fluting coaching programme in place with evaluation processes and the like. What we have is an approach to catch people doing something right, and thanking and encouraging them to do more of what they are doing well. You could call it managing, but even that sounds structured. Our approach is about persistently reinforcing corporate principles that encourage ownership and peer standards. Coaching at Tower is about being visible, communicating, showing interest and creating team spirit. Sorry, it isn’t Harvard.

Can it be for real?

It has worked for us and we think we have everyone engaged. People don’t leave, they don’t go sick and they seem to love their jobs, contributing greatly to team spirit. It is almost family like – and a very proud one.

However, I guess it probably costs us £100,000 per annum or the equivalent to two full-time staff members just to maintain our level of communication. The amount of detail we go into and the time we spend means you have to build in capacity. Ensuring that complex messages are fully understood by all staff takes time. There is no getting away from it – effective communication is time consuming, so you have to have the stomach for it.

But it isn’t all plain sailing. Twenty-nine per cent of Tower employees feel they are unable to do their job without working excessive hours. So we are looking at ways to reduce pressure on staff, focus on what matters and look for ways to build capacity.

It is almost impossible to quantify whether this all leads to better performance. We could just be a high-performing organisation. But we are top of all benchmarks, externally accredited, award winning, highly productive and a learning and continuously improving organisation. Apart from the pressure, it’s a fun place to work.

Can you afford not to take the risk and fully engage with your staff? n

Steve Walker is chief executive of Tower Homes (part of the L&Q group). He can be contacted at swalker@lqgroup.org.uk