Rebecca White

If you’ve followed me or Your Own Place at all, you’ll know that we’re busy, excitable and like to make an impact.

Growing is one way to have more impact and there’s no doubt of the need for our service. Doing everything when you’re a micro enterprise is fine. If we’re going to grow however we have to understand what it is that we do that has the most impact. It’s simply not affordable to replicate everything.

Whilst the content of our delivery is key to our mission of preventing homelessness, it’s the core values that make it work. I’d argue that you could make the Hayes car manuals interesting, if you took our visual, upbeat and values-lead approach to them.

I have loved starting out on fidelity monitoring our interventions. This helps for quality, replication, staff development and understands what’s core and what we can lose.

Getting snapshots of each of our three core interventions has been invaluable and will continue. They are very different, but what the monitoring has shown me is that they all have our values.

The upbeat, visual, unrelenting solution-focused approach that the team executes so beautifully builds resilience. This in turn builds a legacy of empowerment for the people we support and train.

If we replicate that then we can hope to replicate our outcomes too.

Over the last few years no application for funding/income is absent of the word ‘sustainable’. ‘How will you sustain your project?’ they ask.

And over the last few years I’ve moved my thinking on this. There’s no doubt that you don’t have to scale to increase your impact. But do you have to be scale to become sustainable?

I used to trot out the line that success would mean we go out of business – because homelessness is solved. Of course that’s trite and not within our gift. As a true believer in equality I’d also like to see interventions like ours embedded in the community and not driven by people like me from outside.

So I shall happily contradict my naive former self. Assuming that for my lifetime at least there will be children in care, people in prison, people on low incomes and housing still a challenge for many, we can assume our service will be needed. And I’m not afraid to say that it should have certain expertises, expectations, levels of quality and outcomes that require certain levels of investment. As such it should be run as a separate entity (albeit more embedded in the community and including the people it serves).

All of this costs real money. Traditional restricted funding is short-term, output driven and offers little support for sustainability. With almost no infrastructure support funders expect us to become ‘sustainable’ beyond the life of the funding whilst delivering their outputs and reports.

Delivering the project and designing a new sustainable one are two separate projects. And yet only one gets the funding. So if you wonder why I work long hours, it’s because all the additional projects to get sustainable have to happen outside the funding envelope.

With scale comes sustainability in the form of a back office, people to share ideas and generate income, business continuity and a better response for our customers. Getting there alone is the harder part.

Gaining the voice of your team and all your people is just one part of employee engagement. It’s wrapped up in my other preoccupations of leadership, culture and values. So I want to explore it a little more in this blog and hear what it is for you too.

Most of us now recognise that our people are our greatest asset and to stifle their voices would be to the detriment of everyone. They know best what’s going on, what’s motivating our customers and what it’s like to work here. As CEO founder I’m the last person to talk objectively about any of this. Moreover, I enjoy their voice.

As a micro enterprise we’ve no time or money for fancy consultants telling us about 360 stuff or to write an engagement strategy. So it’s down to me to reflect, write blogs and get on with it.

You may now know that I’m obsessed with ‘what works’. Time is too finite to shoot in the dark. So without the fancy strategy, how do we capture what works so that when we grow we can take it with us?

For now though, let’s start with the ‘what’.

Employee voice is definitely not sterile staff surveys or suggestion boxes. These don’t get anyone excited or engaged. We’re not likely to be unionised any time soon either!

From thoughtful listening conversations over the morning coffee, to meaningful supervision and a place to park ideas or share innovations (Trello for us) – these all form a part of employee voice.

Sometimes you’re doing it already! For my part, I need to get better at feeding back where their voice has made a difference or altered what we do.

In addition, I want it to be more meaningful. I want their input into our strategic direction, recruitment and other important decisions.

There is a balance however. They are very busy and I often choose not to ‘burden’ them with additional things to think about. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that whenever I do it’s hugely worthwhile and they always think of an angle or view I hadn’t considered.

Why do we do it? Because having employee voice means a workplace culture of engagement and trust. This means people are safer (can whistleblow) and more motivated and productive too.

And who is responsible? All of us. It comes back to values and recruiting people who want to be a part of this culture.

So we’ve no consultants for a fancy strategy, but maybe I’ve more understanding of ‘what works’ than I first thought.