Social Housing Experience

For the last five years, Pearlcatchers has been working with a range of housing associations and local authorities - from those that were just setting up an ALMO to those where stock transfer had taken place some years previously and those going through a series of mergers and acquisitions.

We have helped these companies with some of the major issues affecting housing associations today – from customer care to creating culture, resident involvement to management development.

  • Customer Service Excellence – customer care is a perennial issue for all organisations and the new Excellence Standard is increasing the need to improve customer care in all parts of the organisation. We can assist in a number of ways from organising training that goes beyond the usual ‘telephone skills’ to doing a full audit of your customer care activities and recommending key areas for improvement
  • Mergers, acquisitions and culture change – M&A’s result in a range of organisational and cultural issues. We can help you to maximise the best from all parties and help to create a culture for the new organisation
  • Management and Leadership Development – in these changing times the skill set of an organisation’s managers and leaders is crucial to its success. We can design and deliver programmes tailored to the sector based around experiential learning that give managers the opportunity to practice skills in ‘real life scenarios’ and so aid transfer of learning back to the job
  • Managing change –successful change needs interventions in three areas: inspirational leadership, transitional management and individual buy-in / commitment. We can help your leaders create the vision, enthusiasm and buy-in and ‘model the way’ for others to follow; equip your managers with the skills to effectively manage their teams through change by making the links between the big picture and individual roles and helping employees manage their personal transitions; and finally helping individuals to embrace change and the possibilities it brings. We also run the innovative Certificate in Organisational Change – a holistic programme, which combines the tools, knowledge and skills needed to successfully implement change
  • Resident Involvement – we can coordinate your Residents Conference from basic event management through to designing and facilitating the entire day. We can also provide training for your employees on designing and running resident involvement activities
  • Employee Engagement – we can organise your staff conference and help you to design and implement engaging internal communication strategies to bring your vision to life

We have also carried out a range of research activities to better understand the challenges and opportunities facing the sector.

This has given us great insight into the way that the social housing sector works and enabled us to tailor our interventions to the very special needs of these clients.

We believe that we are in a unique position
to help those involved in social housing with
what our research tells us are the six critical
areas where learning and development can
add real value:

Free Workshops for Social Housing

Our two free workshops in April 2010 successfully showed delegates the way to achieve Customer Excellence.
Key points that came out of the workshop were:

  • How to create your Customer Excellence Model
  • Set your values
  • Turn your values into actions
  • Inspire your leaders to walk the talk
  • Create a viral change environment
  • Create advocates
  • Create a new culture

Delegate feedback -
"the workshop was very focused and well paced"
"It was a great opportunity meeting others with similar issues"
"Session is good to introduce to management"

If you would like to know how to create Customer Excellence call Karen on 01753 624985.

We plan to run more free training workshops later this year. If you would like to receive dates and topics, or if you have any topic ideas please let us know here.

Social Housing Exhibition 2010

We will be on stand A34 for this years Social Housing Conference and Exhibition (22nd - 24th September at the ICC, Birmingham).

There will be live demonstrations, key speakers, engaging activities, free coaching sessions and lots of fun give aways!

When you visit the stand you will be automatically entered into our free prize draw to win a bottle of champagne and £2,000 worth of training.

You can register and receive a delegate badge by visiting www.socialhousingexhibition.co.uk

We look forward to seeing you there.