Bromford LAB

Neighbourhood Coaching 

Description: Moving on from the Bromford Deal our aim was to move to a way of working which placed a much stronger focus on building strengths based relationships with all our customers. This involved getting to know other community assets in the neighbourhoods where customers live and encouraging reciprocal connections between customers, neighbours and community assets. The approach we took was all about enabling individuals by not doing things for or to them. The outcome was that Bromford now use a ‘coaching approach’; customers retain agency and remain in control.

Actions: Our approach to Neighbourhood Coaching is the earliest example of a ‘lab’ based approach to innovation. It included:

• A ‘Bromford Deal Den’ where three colleagues were taken out of operations and given two months ‘thinking time’ with innovation facilitators;

• A test and learn approach at the early stages such as taking a couple of existing colleagues and asking them to prototype a new role;

• The learning from these approaches forming the basis of six new roles all of which were put into test at the same time;

• The learning from these tests being fused into a smaller number of roles and larger scale pilots;

• The pilots being assessed as successful and the subsequent organisational roll-out.

Outcomes: Bromford’s performance in relation to traditional housing management measures such as rent collection, for example, has been good. Arrears have fallen, despite the rollout of universal credit, and are currently around 1.6 per cent. Early evidence also indicates that customers who know their Neighbourhood Coach are more satisfied and are less likely to be in arrears or to cause ASB.

However, Bromford are still developing their system for monitoring impact in relation to their overarching objective to enable colleagues, customers and neighbourhoods to ‘thrive’. Defining what ‘thriving’ means and how to measure it is a particular challenge.

They plan to routinely ask customers to self-report their perceptions of their own wellbeing, ability to manage their money etc. They expect this to enable better monitoring and reporting of outcomes across their homes as a whole. It will also provide Neighbourhood Coaches with better information to inform their conversations. However, some systems change is needed to enable this to happen and the plan is for it to be in place by early 2020.

Bromford have also noted that their new model is currently costing more, because of the smaller patch sizes but this is a key part of their Strategy to invest in relationships rather than services. They anticipate that there will be a longer term ‘pay-off’ through reduced arrears, less complex ASB cases and fewer voids and associated repairs.

Next Steps: Neighbourhood coaching is our one of our key focuses for innovation so will be kept under continual review. We are currently scoping out a piece of work to help us understand what it means to thrive and how we might go about developing a tool to enable customers and coaches to set and track individual targets and goals. 

Blog Posts: 

The Evolution of The Deal 

Building a Resource to Support Neighbourhood Coaching - January 2019