Engaging the repairs team in tenant engagement – try shared visits?
Tuesday 12th of November 2024
Our November meetup for Local Authority and ALMO engagement officers had an ‘open space’ theme. In other words, “you can talk about anything you want”
The issue participants chose to work on was ‘how to get other parts of the organisation invested in tenant engagement?’ This being a bit of a struggle owing to budget restrictions and high workloads in those teams. The focus was particularly on the repairs service.
Some really helpful ideas came out of the session and one that particularly stuck out to me was for engagement officers to go on visits with repairs operatives. This seems like a nice opportunity to informally share what’s going on with tenant engagement, but also to see the world from the perspective of those in the repairs service and hopefully build up some helpful working relationships. Building trusting relationships came out as a theme of the recent Tpas national scrutiny conference, so this idea definitely chimes with that.
Other helpful ideas included:
- Seeing if there is anyone in the repairs team who can help that you can speak to
- Looking for the little issues as quick wins to start to build a ‘feel good’ factor, for example, operatives not wearing overshoes
- Not focussing on repairs all the time so the spotlight is off them a little
- Sharing the data and using it for quick wins
- Publicising any quick wins in the newsletter; “you said we did”
- Developing an action plan with the repairs team
- Talking to management about the issue - get them involved, out and about
- Running a tenant engagement awareness campaign with the repairs team
- Involving local politicians
- Looking at different ways of presenting performance reports
- Suggesting customer contact training for repairs staff
About the meetup
The meetup took place on Zoom on 6th November 2024. We had 14 engagement officers take part, the session was led by Dave Mckenna, Tpas Associate.
As usual, we had a series of interactive activities allowing participants to share experiences and ideas as well as trying out some engagement techniques. We started with our regular ‘nine-minute networking’ – two nine-minute rounds of discussing two talking points in groups of 3 or 4, mixed up for the second round. We then used Mentimeter (an online survey tool) to gather topic suggestions and identify a one to work on through voting.
After that we used a ‘solution circle’. This involves one participant sharing a challenge they have and then listening with their mic off as others share ideas, first in turn and then as a general discussion. At the end the ‘problem sharer’ gets to feedback what they heard that was useful. We finished, as always, with ‘open space’ – an opportunity for participants to raise anything at all to the whole group.
Our LA and ALMO staff meet up offer
Our next meet up is on 21st January 2025 and you can book your place here
We also have an online networking group on our Tpas Connect platform. If you would like to join the group, please email lisa.holt@tpas.org.uk
For information on Tpas Connect click here