How should contractors engage with tenants?
Wednesday 10th of February 2021
What do you want from contractors, how would you expect them to behave and engage?
With our new National Tenant Engagement Standards just hitting the streets, we are turning our attention to the contracting world.
We are talking about main contractors and sub-contractors that provide a large amount of the face to face activities when maintaining or improving the homes of social housing residents.
We know that many social housing contractors do some great work, and some that we work with are steps ahead when it comes to working with local communities and evidencing real impact.
Well now we want to create a brand new set of Contractor Engagement Standards. This will be the first time Tpas England has done this, so we need the help of our members.
We are talking overarching principles as well as the practical activities
Delivering a service is one thing, but how you do it, the behaviours and culture that surrounds an organisation can have a positive or negative influence. We want to get in that space and provide a set of engagement standards that are meaningful yet sufficiently challenging enough to make a fundamental difference.
We are setting up a project to hear from our members what matters to them when selecting contractors to work with. We want to know the key topics of interest that you would assess a contractor on, would it be:
- How they listen to residents and act on their feedback?
- What does their learning from complaints look like?
- How punctual they are, do they have a caring and compassionate side?
- Does it matter if they care about the environment or how they impact on the local community?
- Or something completely different?
Michael Hill, Tpas England Business Development Manager is setting up a series of events to discuss this topic and gather Tpas member views.
Once we have those views Tpas will create a set of draft Contractor Engagement Standards for further discussion.
Do you have something to say on what our contractor engagement standards should look like? If so, come along and let’s start learning what is working well and how we can start to drive up the importance of what matters to residents.