Transforming Services — we can’t do this without you!

We want to set out for you our approach to understanding employee experience within Homes England and to share our learning to date. We also want to seek further involvement and input as to how we progress. You can respond to the article by posting a comment and you can also contact the team at digital@homesengland.gov.uk.

What we are doing is part of a real organisation-wide change. Knowing that we want to make a major change to the housing market and deliver more affordable homes right across the country means we need an organisation that is truly capable of matching this ambition. This programme is a crucial factor in creating this agile, effective and innovative organisation.

This summer we spent time at Homes England to understand the ways we are working and identify the tools to make us a 21st century organisation. Our discovery team was made up of colleagues from Homes England, Accenture and Futuregovers alongside our enthusiastic participants who willingly gave up their time to contribute to our user research.

What is Employee Experience?

Employee Experience is the sum of our perceptions during our daily interactions as employees. This is formed from the social, work and physical aspects within which we work. Our discovery focused on identifying the right tools so that we can better do our jobs and improve our overall experience.

Source: IBM Institute for Business Value

What is Discovery?

Before building a new service we need to find out what users need and what services already exist. To identify the right tools we carried out user research to really understand the tasks we do and the context in which we are working. We researched widely and deeply to uncover the who, what, why, when and where of how we carry out our everyday tasks.

What did we do?

We started with a few short interviews over the phone to get an initial feel for the opportunities across ways of working, environments and tools. Given we had limited time, this helped us to identify that focussing on tools would have the most impact.

To extend our research widely we worked with 54 employees across roles, locations, seniority and ways of working. Our willing participants took part in diary studies by sending us pictures and messages about their tasks and goals real-time via Whatsapp. We received over 1245 pictures with 1500 captions highlighting that our working days are mainly filled with emails (particularly managing our inbox), meetings, cross-referencing and travel.

This was followed by shadowing with 14 colleagues across roles and locations. In total we spent over 70 hours with colleagues and got a great insight into what works for them, what doesn’t and why. This gave us real understanding of pain points and opportunities with many tangible examples.

We trialled two working environments; Office 365 with Teams and GSuite and investigated the best options for provisioning, supporting and managing our mobile devices in future.

How did we work?

We worked in an agile way by dividing our time into two week periods (sprints), developing our capabilities and working in the open by feeding back through Show and Tells and out and about shadowing and trailing new tools. We recruited participants through multiple channels: Intranet, Facebook Workplace, leadership meetings, targeted emails and in person.

What did we discover?

Many of the findings will not come as a surprise and in fact can be the starting point for real improvements. Our people are fountains of knowledge but deal with very inconsistent processes. Our ‘here to help’ culture makes the organisation resilient but it disguises the inefficiency of our tools and inconsistency of our approach.

“I wasn’t sure where would be the best place to look so, I called a colleague I know who used to work on the programme to check. We are still quite dependable on staffs historical knowledge.”

We work in siloed systems, and we are always cross-referencing because we don’t have confidence in the data we use. “Systems don’t talk to each other. We need to ask two systems and the four people down the road to find out how many houses we’ve built in a place.” We need to ensure the use of reliable, up to date and complete data.

The limitations in collaboration and productivity tools are limiting what employees can achieve.

There is an over reliance on email, a lot of time spent managing inboxes, our tasks are complex and we use an awful lot of acronyms which can act as a barrier for communication and understanding, especially for new starters. “Lync call with ESE colleagues to update them on progress of OGD transfers in their area. Excel download from LMT.”

Our day to day tools need to be better. In fact there are too many tools, not enough automation, and an over reliance on paper.

“Currently 16 windows active (including emails). At month end it can be upwards of 30 windows at once.”

“If we could have something where multiple people could edit a document at once that would literally change my life.”

Security needs to empower employees to make the right decision, policies need to be simplified and easily understood.

“I’m working from home today so I have been through the 3–4 stage process to login. I used a wired connection as there’s always been something wrong with the white HE box although I don’t really have room for it and don’t know what its purpose is anyway.”

What next?

Having identified what we need to do to improve our experience by selecting the right tools we now need to streamline the number of tools to reduce complexity and embed security so we can make tasks more efficient while simplifying working away from the office.

Quick wins are being introduced such as increasing the default mailbox size to lighten the load on time spent managing our inboxes. We will be working at pace to deliver Microsoft 365 with Teams as well as piloting Google Docs to modernise our software and provide new ways to collaborate internally and externally.

A new mobile solution capable of supporting a range of devices will result in an improved mobile experience and we be replacing the burden of our slow and heavy hardware with new devices running Windows 10.

Where next?

The way we have approached this work is as important as the work itself. It is about knowing the real experience of our employees and users of our services. You have engaged brilliantly and the learning will be useful to so much of what we want to do to make us a 21st century organisation. Changing an organisation is a huge challenge — it needs a great deal of honesty, from all parts, to understand and accept the improvements we need to make. Therefore our next steps must also be about inclusivity.

Call to Action

To truly transform future services the best results come from working in multidisciplinary and blended teams. There are lots of opportunities to get involved from volunteering to participate in user research, attending show and tells and asking lots of questions to being part of a project team and bringing along your expertise and knowledge. We really can’t do this without you!

Amanda Staincliffe, Interim Head of Employee Experience & Belen Palacios, Senior Service Designer