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Housing Salaries Comparison 2011

Once again this year we are running our Salary Comparison service for smaller housing providers.
We have improved the questionnaire for 2011 to provide more comparative analysis of the terms and conditions offered by different providers. Everyone who submits data will receive a regional and national report that will help them and their Boards judge how the pay and rewards they offer compare with others.
For an organisation with ten staff it should take about two hours to enter details for the whole organisation, although those who participated last year will simply have to update last year’s figures. For those who have not participated before there is more detail below.
Salaries, terms and conditions will be recorded as at 1 April 2011 and need to be submitted by 31 July. The reports will be available at the end of August.
This service is free for SPBM subscribers. Please let us know if you would like to take part this year.

How Salary Comparison Works

Our Salaries Comparison service uses web-forms and a secure database to capture and compare details of each job-role in member organisations; defining the role and the responsibilities as well as the rewards offered.
There is a great deal of diversity within the sector and roles in smaller organisations are often hard to pin down. We have worked closely with chief executives from smaller housing providers to design a system that captures all the relevant information.
We have made the process as simple as possible to complete while capturing enough information about each job- role to enable meaningful comparisons.
For smaller organisations job-title alone is not necessarily a good indication of a person’s role, so each post is rated using a simple matrix of areas/levels of responsibility. Each organisation also inputs a summary of their general terms and conditions

Partnership with HouseMark

Skills & Projects have agreed a benchmarking partnership with HouseMark that we believe will bring significant benefits to subscribers of both organisations.

New services for members

While our work supporting clubs and individuals from smaller housing associations continues as before, our members now have access to the housing practitioner resources and networking that is available through HouseMark, with performance data from our Smaller Providers Benchmarking (SPBM) system being copied into HouseMark’s PI Tracking database.

HouseMark’s data validation and definitions ensure comparison of apples with apples.

HouseMark is the leading source of cross-sector cost and performance data for social housing, providing performance and efficiency improvement services to over 900 members. If you are an SPBM member and want to find out more about the new HouseMark services you are entitled to please get in touch.

Response to the new partnership has been extremely positive, and we have new clubs and members throughout England. The message is clear: against the backdrop of uncertainty about regulation and tough economic conditions, working with your peers is an extremely effective way of meeting the challenges ahead.

Diana Kingdon, Chair of the NHF National Smaller HAs Group  describes SPBM as “An excellent service that enables us to compare our performance with peers and groups of smaller associations as well as nationally. Easy to set up and record data, well set out reports, and a wealth of information through the link with HouseMark”.

Small specialists

The new broader comparative framework, combined with access to the HouseMark resources, means that we are increasingly working with smaller specialist organisations, who have struggled in the past to find a peer group.

If you are a small, specialist organisation without a ‘club’ of obvious peers, we will aim to find you a similar group of organisations to provide you with useful comparative reports against which you can measure your own performance. You can also plug straight  into the national network of good practice and peer support through HouseMark.

Show me the data

We have always encouraged our benchmarking clubs to promote the fact that they are engaged in performance improvement and to publicise their successes. We are now taking that a step further.

Our members have expressed concerns that smaller housing associations performance data is not published anywhere or, worse, that the Tenant Services Authority website suggests that smaller providers have somehow failed to provide performance data.

Our SPBM website will soon provide the opportunity for tenants and other stakeholders of smaller housing associations to compare their landlord with others both nationally and locally.

We hope to develop this service in future to help our members meet the regulatory requirement of reporting to tenants on their performance, and that this will lead to a greater level of involvement of residents in benchmarking and the scrutiny of housing providers.

Mystery Shopping – how we can help

We are involved in a number of mystery shopping programmes in both the housing and health sectors. Mystery shoppers are paid to use services specifically for audit or evaluation purposes without disclosing their identity as evaluators.  They have proved to be effective in different environments, providing detailed, constructive feedback on elements of service provision. Here are a few suggestions on how to get the most out of mystery shopping:

Keep it simple

Evaluate responses to a simple request presented in a straightforward manner rather than a complex or difficult problem. Use clear and uncomplicated evaluation forms. Avoid using ‘If you answered ‘Yes’ then go to … ’ types of question.

Recruit and support

Tenants and service users are the best judges of customer service but make sure you give them the support and training they need. Use trial shops and role-plays to ensure they are confident and comfortable with their role.

Scale

Better results are obtained when a small number of services receive a large number of ‘shops’.  A minimum of ten shops per service is required to provide robust feedback on a service: 15-20 shops is ideal.

Timetable

Doing the shops over a short period of time can compromise confidentiality and result in mystery shoppers being easily identified.  Spreading activities over a four to six week period works well.

Long term results

It takes time to develop successful mystery shopping programmes. You can get rich and useful information from the start but your mystery shoppers will need to grow into the role, particularly in developing self-confidence, team work and feedback skills.

Preparation

Discuss the programme with all those who are likely to be ‘shopped’ at an early stage to explain the plan and discuss any concerns. Be open with then. Advance knowledge in itself can lead to improved performance.

Focus on the positive

Customer satisfaction is an essential element of high quality service provision. Mystery shopping is about improving organisational performance and identifying the development needs of those in customer service roles.

Anonymity

On one hand, if feedback is anonymised staff have confidence that they will not be individually reported on. On the other hand, this makes it impossible to attribute instances of high quality or very poor service to a particular member of staff. Are you evaluating a service as a whole or looking at individual performance? Decide which is most important to you and remember to discuss how you intend to use the results with your staff before you start.

Standards

Mystery shopping based on clear customer service standards makes sense to everyone involved and provides the benchmark for service improvement. It is also a good way of reminding everyone what those standards are.

Feedback

Run sessions where the mystery shoppers discuss their experience with service providers and provide an opportunity to discuss proposed improvements. Do the full service improvement loop.

Talk to us

We can help you to design, set up and run a mystery shopping programme with your residents or service users.

Housing Salaries

In view of Grant Shapps’ recent undertaking to ‘Shine a Light’ on salaries paid to housing association staff along with the public sector we thought it might be useful to highlight some of the findings from our 2010 salary comparison of 30 smaller providers—housing associations managing up to 1,000 homes.

• The median Chief Executive’s salary was £54,000 with the upper and lower quartiles £64,000 and £50,000 respectively.
• Approximately one third of CEOs receive a car allowance.
• Two CEOs are paid a bonus (4% and 12%).
• One in three of the associations have a final salary pension scheme.
• One in six use a defined benefit scheme.

Annual Reports and VFM

There is no specific requirement to tell your residents how much you spent on their first annual report but the more we thought about it the more we felt it to be an absolute must.

So how much did it cost? Perhaps more importantly, did you tell your residents how much it cost? Was it worth it?

In advising and supporting housing providers with their annual reports, we have emphasised a number of things:

• The need to be honest and frank about performance, and the need to hold your hands up to things that have not gone so well or could be done better

• The potential to use the annual reporting process as a way of encouraging greater involvement (particularly in developing resident scrutiny and local offers)
• The value of resident feedback on reports, particularly as to whether they are interesting, useful and easy to read
• The need to develop resident ownership of both the content of the report and the process of putting it together.

Telling your residents how much the report cost clearly pushes the openness and transparency button. A published cost is also likely to provoke reaction, from which you might hope to get engagement. A published cost sets a benchmark for next year and potentially a budget for those residents who get involved in next year’s report. Will they want to spend less or more? What will you do, if they regard the whole process as a waste of money?

We have been surprised at the cost of reports per resident, particularly for smaller housing providers, once the costs of external help and staff time as well as design, printing and distribution costs are included.

Coincidentally, value for money stands out as the area providers most need to tackle before their next annual report.

Sharing your annual report

Did you produce a really good report? Do you think others might learn something from what you have produced? We are inviting organisations to share their annual reports with us as part of our commitment to developing a good practice resource for smaller housing providers. The reports and other good practice will be available through our SPBM website and we will be talking to HouseMark about potential links with their own good practice resources.

Breaking the bad news

We recently had the rather dubious pleasure of breaking the news to a group of residents that their landlord had put a serious question-mark over the future of their sheltered housing scheme. The meeting ended with residents visibly shocked and one or two in tears. Involvement of local councillors, interest from the local press and reports of sleepless nights were to follow. A second meeting (also attended by many relatives) effectively saw residents vote with their feet and walk away from the consultation process.

So how does this square with a commitment to genuine consultation and excellent customer service? There are two really big issues here. One is about trust. The other concerns perceptions of older people.

Firstly, residents did not sufficiently trust their landlord or indeed us an independent facilitator of the consultation process. This is despite us knowing two things – that no decision had been taken and that the housing provider had done its homework (notably in establishing that supply significantly outstrips demand for this sort of housing in the local area). But no matter how hard we tried we could not fully persuade residents (or perhaps more importantly their relatives) of either of these things. To some extent it has been back to the drawing board – including more analysis of supply and demand, discussions with local authorities and other local housing providers. While the picture now if anything looks worse, we are hopeful that this additional effort will have built a bit more trust, enough to get the consultation process back on the road.

Secondly, we have been reflecting on whether or not older people need to be treated any differently from anyone else. Emotionally the answer is ‘yes’. This is a diverse group of people who need to be treated with that extra bit of sensitivity. Older people don’t deserve great upheavals and are perhaps less well equipped to cope with change. Logically the answer is ‘no’. This group of people  have spent their lives dealing with all of the things life has chucked at them, some of which has been far tougher than that experienced by people of younger years.

Is it not a little patronising to treat some people differently on the basis of their age?

We are left thinking about the time and attention that it takes to build trust. Trust is based on those involved in any relationship knowing that there is a will towards mutual understanding and care. It flourishes where there is some element of choice and some scope to make mistakes. Good customer service requires honesty in all our communications even when it comes to discussing things people might not want to hear. Oh and don’t leave people in the dark, even if you
haven’t yet resolved an issue or decided what you are going to do.

Award winning leadership and management development

We are pleased to report that the University of Westminster’s Corporate Services Management Programme has received its second award. It is runner-up in the Talent Retention category of the Chartered Management Institute’s prestigious national management and leadership awards. Last year the programme won the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education’s Staff Development Impact award. We have made a significant contribution to the programme over the last three years and will be working with final group of 50 or so managers who will be undertaking the programme over the next few months.

Brother Where Art Thou?

A recent discussion about the TSA’s annual reporting requirements reminded us of an account of working in the War Office during the 1950s.

Beautifully prepared records of resources held and consumed would arrive from all over the globe. Not without a little ceremony each unread document would be carefully placed in the steel cabinet.

When at bursting point, a call to the janitor would bring the rumble of trolley wheels. Off the documents would go for incineration, thus creating the required storage space for the cycle to begin again.

Presented as an example of the bumbling management practices of the time, we wondered if in fact something much more sophisticated was going on. Undoubtedly it was good management practice to hold people to account on a regular basis and so long as everyone submitting the records believed in the importance of the task that accountability was enforced. Job done. No need to waste time scrutinising the documents and in any case no resources to do so were available.

Is this regulatory efficiency or unnecessary central reporting? Is Big Brother watching or has he got more important things to do? Is Big Brother watching or are things going to be different in Big Society?

Salary Comparison 2010

We have recently revamped our web-based salaries comparison service, which provides smaller associations with meaningful comparisons between the salaries and other rewards they offer their staff and those offered by similar organisations facing similar challenges.

In developing the service we realised that for smaller organisations job-title alone is not necessarily a good indication of a person’s role, so each post is rated using a simple matrix of areas/levels of responsibility.

This year we have around forty subscribers from London, the South East and South West regions participating in the exercise, and we will be reporting the results in September.

More details at www.salarycomp.co.uk