Our Resident Engagement Strategy for 2022-2025, ‘Shaping our Future,’ sets out how Sanctuary will work with those who live in our homes to improve the services we deliver.
The views of more than 3,000 residents and 350 staff helped shape the strategy following a largescale listening exercise.
From the feedback, we have three clear priorities:
1. Local engagement
Residents want to talk to their local Sanctuary team about local issues.
2. Strategic engagement
Strengthening resident influence on significant decisions.
3. Customer experience
Residents want a better experience when raising day-today issues.
Graham Jones (pictured) chairs our National Resident Scrutiny Panel and helped create ‘Shaping our Future.
Graham said: “This strategy outlines a roadmap for resident engagement which provides even more opportunities to get involved.
"I’d encourage all Sanctuary residents to step forward and seize this fantastic opportunity to shape the future, together."
Priority 1: Strengthening Local Engagement
One resident told us: “Local engagement is about local people meeting with neighbours and local colleagues to solve local issues.” We can’t put it any better.
You also told us that being kept informed about what is going on locally is important. We know we need to be more consistent and do more of this.
To improve how we engage with you locally, we will:
- Work with you on the largest programme of local resident engagement in our history – ‘A conversation with Sanctuary’ – and then work to make this business as usual.
- Review how we work, so your local team can engage more with local residents.
- Provide our local teams with better tools and support to do this.
- Make sure you know all the ways you can engage with your local team and neighbours.
- Develop new ways of keeping you informed about what’s going on in your area.
Local engagement can lead to bigger change but we know not everything can be resolved locally. Where this is the case, we’ll work with you to make sure we have more effective ways of escalating issues.
Priority 1 Case Study
Our team in London has been working with the Resident Association in Hackney’s Kingsmead estate to hear people’s thoughts on its facilities and green spaces. After running a survey and holding two community events we found many residents wanted a secure place for their bicycle.
We’re now funding new bike storage with a mix of Sanctuary and Sport England funding through the King’s Park Moving Together fund. We believe this is a good example of simple and responsive engagement.
Priority 2: Strengthening Strategic Engagement
The second priority is to increase the influence of residents around strategic issues and how we are run.
We already have a National Resident Review Panel who carry out scrutiny work on our performance and services and make recommendations to the Sanctuary Scotland Board of Management.
To deliver on this commitment, we will:
- Review our current Tenant Participation Strategy to strengthen the residents’ role.
- Increase the range of ways that you can get involved and influence strategic issues, to help us hear from residents with diverse and varied lived experiences.
- Work with you to co-create new service standards for the services you receive, that you can then hold us accountable to deliver on.
For more information check out our Get Involved page.
Priority 2 Case Study
This year, we have worked closely with our Complaints Community of Interest Group to improve how we manage customer complaints. More than 150 of you shared your feedback and experiences about making a complaint to us. We used your views to help us design a better and more resident-focused approach to complaints. We discuss our progress regularly with National Resident Scrutiny Panel vice-chair Bob Werrett and held further webinars to talk with residents throughout.
Alongside this, we have worked with the National Resident Scrutiny Panel to complete our annual self-assessment against the Housing Ombudsman Complaint Handling Code. The changes agreed with residents are being put in place.
Priority 3: Listening to every voice to improve the Customer Experience
We know not everyone wants or has the time to get involved with us directly but this shouldn’t mean that you don’t have a voice. The more of you we hear from, the better we understand your experiences and the better we can make our services.
This strategy will increase the ways that you can let us know what you think about our services, homes and neighbourhoods without waiting to be asked.
To deliver on this commitment we will:
- Introduce a broader range of tools to ask your views about services you receive from us in real-time.
- Introduce ‘always on’ options for you to give us feedback on any issue that is important to you.
- Improve how we listen and learn from complaints.
- Improve how we bring all your individual voices together to tell a clear story to residents engaged in our governance, our Board Members and our Senior Management, giving a clear ‘Voice of the Customer.’
Priority 3 Case Study
We’ve worked with 400 residents to develop a new Tone of Voice guide for our Housing and Supported Living customers. Residents get lots of different communications from us and we knew the inconsistent tone did not provide a positive customer experience (or the warm relationship we would like).
Residents encouraged us to think differently about how we communicate. You made sure that we consider the tone and channel used from all angles. There is no doubt that the contributions from residents made us better informed and better able to deliver communications that work. One of the key outcomes is the creation of a Resident Editorial Panel to help shape our future work.
What we'll do in Year 1
1. Strengthening Local Engagement
Residents want to talk to our local teams about what matters most locally.
In Year 1, we’ll:
- Learn what works best when we engage locally by reviewing what we do and by trying new things.
- Refresh our Resident Engagement Toolkit with practical guidance for our frontline teams.
- Create tailored resident engagement strategies for every high-rise building, informed by our Building Safety pilots.
- Look to engage with residents in a way we know is effective when we’re communicating planned improvements to their homes.
2. Strengthening Strategic Engagement
Strengthening the influence of our residents on significant decisions.
In Year 1, we’ll:
- Work with residents to produce new service standards so residents know what to expect from our services.
- Introduce a Group Housing Board. This new body will make sure our Group Board hears directly from residents about our service standards and whether these standards are what residents expect and deserve.
- Recruit a Residents’ Advisory Panel to advise our Group Board and senior management on new strategy.
- Develop a ‘pathway’ to support residents who want to become a part of any one of our Boards.
3. Customer Experience
Listening to the voice of every resident to improve every resident’s experience.
In Year 1, we’ll:
- Work with residents to better understand their ‘customer journeys’ from the point they move in to the time they move out, so we can improve those experiences.
- Bring in ways our residents can point out problems in ‘real-time’ so we can put things right more quickly. This will start with our repair service in Scotland.
- Give our residents more opportunity to share their views of our services through our website.
- Continue to listen to resident feedback about how we handle complaints. We’ll work with our Scrutiny Panel to improve this process.
How we will measure success
We’ll work closely with residents to measure the success of ‘Shaping our Future’ and to check it delivers on our commitments to you.
We want you to:
- Feel there are genuine opportunities for you to get involved.
- Feel we listen to you more.
- Feel you can influence decisions more.
- Trust us more.
We want to co-create our services with you and will measure our success by asking you. If we get this right we believe it will lead to you being more satisfied, both with our services and with us as your landlord.
We will work together to find the best ways to understand and communicate our impact. This will be done through:
- Regularly reviewing engagement activities to understand their impact and the number of people engaging with us.
- Tracking our progress in co-creating our services with Resident Satisfaction and Performance indicators.
- Developing a way to communicate the positive impact that engagement has on our residents and communities.
- Monitoring how successful we are in being inclusive and engaging with our diverse communities.
- Regularly reporting on progress to Boards, Resident Groups, and management teams.
- Reporting our progress to every resident once a year.
How do you think we can improve?
This strategy is not set in stone and Sanctuary is always looking for ways to be better.
Please us the feedback form to tell us how you think we can improve.