Success, Satisfaction and Scrutiny:
the Resident Engagement Toolkit
Make scrutiny genuinely
resident-led
One strategy we’ve adopted is to provide
information collected through informal
means (surveys, mystery shopping etc…)
to our formal groups to review. We’d
recommend it for three reasons.
We recommend the following to greatly
improve the effectiveness of scrutiny:
1. Let residents decide which parts of
the business to scrutinise and when.
Resident-led scrutiny lets residents address
their own priorities (rather than these being
dictated by staff or board) and keeps all
services across the business ‘on their
toes’. Engaging residents in complaints
monitoring helps; exposure to complaints
trends and performance means residents
can trigger reviews into the most pressing
concerns of the wider resident body
2. Let residents capture their own
evidence. Residents should be able to
obtain their own evidence in addition to that
supplied by the landlord. It helps improve
transparency and the power of scrutiny. Our
Residents’ Council and Area Panels can
commission resident monitors and mystery
shoppers to gather evidence on their behalf
3. Allow residents a say in determining
the scrutiny budget. That’s so they have
an influence in the scope and resources
dedicated to scrutiny as well as its topics.
4. Let residents co-evaluate their
success. We produce annual effectiveness
reports for all parts of our governance
structure. Residents are involved in drafting
the reports and monitoring progress
against the resulting action lists.
1. It means decisions are increasingly
evidence-based, reducing the bias that
might arise if involved residents were to
draw solely upon their own experiences
2. It acts as a form of cross-checking, helping
reality-check the trends you’ve identified
3. It ensures there are links between the
different elements of your involvement offer.
Case study eight:
Providing the right
amount of information
Providing the right amount of easily
understandable, relevant and timely
information is essential in enabling evidencebased decision making at meetings. We
recently reviewed the information we provide
quarterly to Area Panels, significantly
reducing the length of our “Taking the
Temperature” performance report to fit
with the principles above. We estimate
this change, focusing on visualising
performance information and geared
towards automatable reporting, will save
us £5,000 a year by cutting completion
times from six hours to 30 minutes.
Gather information from
various sources
When Area Panels are selecting their
priorities for the forthcoming year we also
help by providing contextual information on
the surrounding area. Our Area Factsheets
include information on the likes of local
antisocial behaviour and unemployment
together with comparisons against our other
operating regions and national averages.
Surveys, consultations and records of
customer contact produce a huge amount
of data on residents’ preferences, but its
potential could go unharnessed without a
coordinated approach. The need will only
increase with the increasing ubiquity of
‘Big Data’ and the ‘Internet of Things’.
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