New order

It all began in July 2000, when Home's board set out its vision for customer service, including a five-year plan to overhaul systems. Repairs is a crucial area for Home – it spends £8.2m on it in the North-east every year and as Anthony Brown, assistant head of responsive repairs, says: "There are increasing demands on services and you've got to respond, or be a housing association with a lot of empty properties. Our service wasn't a shambles, it was just inefficient."

So, in May 2002, Brown enlisted the help of Vanguard Consulting and its charismatic managing director, John Seddon, to kick off a core process review. Vanguard trained four service improvement managers who, with Brown, analysed exactly what happens when a repair is reported. Then each process was reworked to give the shortest, smoothest line from report to completion. "It's simple," says Brown. "It just means looking at the service with the people who do the work to iron out the irrationalities. We tried to avoid sitting in offices making decisions."

Brown took the view that there are only two parts to a repair: the call to report it and the satisfactory completion of the work. The rest is waste, and fair game.

Home has five depots across the North, but the work began at Neptune, which serves 4000 houses in the North Tyne area. The review team spent hours poring over data on the service, and drew together staff from throughout the cycle – call-centre workers, administrators and tradespeople – to see how colleagues in other departments worked. "In any organisation, where parts of the supply chain are separate, sometimes people don't know why they're doing certain tasks. Getting people together allowed us to get a real understanding of the work," explains Brown.

For example, tradespeople used to resent call-centre workers for putting the wrong codes on job orders, but ill will evaporated when the tradespeople witnessed the calls flooding in and the struggle to classify each job from 600 options. Together, the team isolated bureaucracy, replacing rigid procedures with statements of purpose, principles and practice ideals. Rather than attempting to meet Audit Commission targets at any cost, Home devised its own ways of measuring the system.

"If you're challenging the purpose of the system, you have to challenge the targets," says Brown. "They tell you you're doing a cracking job, but when you talk to the customers, they're left wanting." The previous obsession with targets diverted efforts from improving the service, he adds. "People will use their energies and innovation to meet targets, and something has to give – usually quality."

Things are certainly different now. When the Audit Commission turned up to inspect Home's maintenance service last month, it must have been taken aback by what it found at the Neptune depot. "They asked to see our new policies, but we didn't have any," says Brown. "The customer sets the standards and we all hold the principles."

One of Home's principles was to complete repairs as soon as possible, rather than within the government's 28-day time limit. Official statistics say the number of repairs completed within 28 days has dropped to 90%. But Home's measures tell a different story: the average end-to-end time for each job has fallen from 38 days to eight.

Convention scrapped
And that's not the only way that Home's souped-up service deviates from convention. The cumbersome code system has been scrapped in favour of generic categories for jobs, eliminating yo-yoing paperwork as admin staff and tradespeople correct mistakes – Brown found that three-quarters of the codes were inaccurate in the first place, so the change has saved a lot of time.

Formal pre-inspections have ceased. Tradespeople are trusted to do them instead and have a greater degree of responsibility over other aspects of their work. Previously, when a repair needed more than one skill, tenants had to wait for the next leg of the job to be centrally coordinated. Now, the tradesperson contacts their colleague by mobile while still at the tenant's home to arrange a convenient time for further work.

Given Home's worker-centric approach and the shortage of skilled tradespeople, it's not surprising that job satisfaction has shaped the reformed service. "We want to be an employer of choice as well as a landlord," says Brown. "People want purpose, they want to add value instead of being chained to the yoke. Before, there was no code for thinking time, you just got paid for the work you did. Now each tradesperson can take responsibility for the service to tenants."

Replacing the central depot with "virtual suppliers" has saved hours, as workers no longer have to join long queues for supplies every Monday morning. Instead, local shops supply tradespeople with materials and send invoices to Home. Setting up dedicated teams for responsive repairs and voids has also improved turnaround time, particularly on empty properties where the labour force said they were often called away to carry out responsive repairs. From April 2002 to March 2003, the association turned around 175 voids, 47% more than the year before.

Like many landlords, Home is negotiating with unions to replace the bonus system for its 35 tradespeople. It hopes to have new terms and conditions – equivalent to those for office staff – decided by December. In the mean time, it is paying workers the average of their bonuses. Brown says this has freed up supervisors from policing the system.

He questions why the Audit Commission recommends that landlords do post-inspections in 10% of jobs. "You could get supervisors playing the numbers game, picking 20 houses in one area and spending 10 minutes in each," he says.

At Home, tradespeople return with their managers to look over the work in as many cases as possible. The emphasis is on finding out how they did the work and discussing whether it could have been improved.

"As soon as you ask someone 'why', they tend to get defensive," states Brown. "We ask 'how can we make it better?'. In one case, for instance, the tradesman had to call in an electrician to box in the skirting; maybe we should just train him to do it himself."

Home has an ambitious training programme and has taken on 12 apprentices. So far, its tradespeople have all attended a three-day health and safety course and advanced driving courses are planned. But Brown sees multiskilling, and using existing workers to train others, as the key to ironing out kinks and adding job satisfaction: "It'll make for a more interesting worklife."

Call-centre staff have also seen their lot improve. While many associations are centralising, Home has decided to move North Tyne's two dedicated workers to the Neptune depot, so they get to know the area and the tradespeople and can go out on jobs. "It's a bit more varied, and they get the chance to be involved," says Brown, adding that call-centre staff have also started collecting tenant feedback, which is then fed back to shape further improvements.

Home is only just past the halfway mark on its quest for improvement, and Brown knows there is still much to be done, both at Neptune and in the other depots' less advanced reviews. It's a laborious process – he estimates that 6-8% of staff time across the organisation was spent on the review last year, plus the efforts of the four systems improvements managers.

"It's been a bit of a rollercoaster in terms of enthusiasm and energy," admits Brown. "You can get the quick wins, changing the processes, but the longer journey is getting people to think differently. That's the challenge for management – you have to change the system, but you also need human resources skills."

Efficiency drives and changes in working practices are usually a recipe for worker unrest, but Brown says Home has tried to reassure staff that redundancies are not the goal. "There's never a shortage of things to do and there's plenty of opportunity for people to learn new things," he says.

Winning round staff isn't the biggest challenge, though. The key is what the inspectors make of the service. Their verdict's due before Christmas: watch this space.