Have your say about our resident involvement approach

Resident involvement has always been important to us at East Thames. It’s important because we want to make sure that you have your say and help shape the way we work, while we learn how to improve our services and work more effectively.

HAVE YOUR SAY

We’re committed to giving residents a chance to have a say in the services they receive and we’re wanting to provide more opportunities to residents to get involved in a variety of different ways.

We know that in the past a lot of resident involvement has been focused on panels and formal meetings, so we want to look at how these groups work as well as lots of other ways to get feedback, such as resident mystery shopping, resident inspectors, more online surveys and supporting more tenant groups and associations in local areas.

But, before we change anything, we’re interested to get your views.

CAN WE HAVE 5 MINUTES OF YOUR TIME?

We’ve got a quick online survey all about resident involvement. It will only take 5 minutes of your time and we’re using the feedback to help us develop a new resident involvement strategy.

If you take part by Friday 1st October, you’ll be in the draw to win one of four £50 shopping vouchers.

Please complete the short questionnaire here.

WHY IS EAST THAMES REVIEWING IT’S APPROACH TO RESIDENT INVOLVEMENT?

Firstly, because it’s a really important part of providing good services to our residents. It’s also a little while since we reviewed our approach and we felt there were some areas we could improve.

The review started in mid-2010 and we started by talking to active residents who are on panels and advisory groups. This review confirmed that we need to change our approach in some key areas. We need:

To involve residents at a more local level, through tenant and resident associations and consultation forums.

To engage with a wider range of residents to make sure we get views that are representative of all residents and the neighbourhoods we serve.

To offer different ways to get involved, for instance, through our website, e-mail and texting not just face to face.

To increase resident scrutiny of our performance, giving more residents the power to challenge the way we work, our performance and our plans for the future.

A partnership approach with staff and residents working together to improve services.

To provide more training so residents can participate fully.

We also talked to lots of residents at an event in late July and got lots of feedback about how people want to get involved and the kinds of things they want to get involved in.

We’ll be providing regular updates on our progress.

Vision

We think our proposed vision for resident involvement should be:

“By 2015, we will have put residents at the heart of our business, engaging them meaningfully so they drive local and strategic improvement in our housing services"

And the things that we should focus on to achieve this could be:

Establishing an independent trained panel of representative residents that assess our overall performance, how we deliver services and identify improvements and that this panel talks directly to our board.

Training residents to be able to inspect our services and test our standards.

Developing more formal arrangements for residents to monitor how we deliver our services locally.

Partnership working between residents and staff on failing service areas to resolve problems and improve performance.

Using a wider range of ways and new technology to get feedback from more residents on our housing services.

Providing a wide range of training and support to residents so they can effectively monitor our performance and influence business decisions.

Complete the short questionnaire here.