Best Companies 3 Star

Colleague experience and wellbeing

The rollout of our Corporate Plan provided a valuable opportunity to review and reaffirm our Believe in People strategy, ensuring its objectives remain closely aligned with our organisational values.

Central to this strategy is our commitment to colleague experience and wellbeing, which continues to underpin our culture and drive performance.

Over the past year, we have taken meaningful steps to strengthen our approach to wellbeing, resilience, and inclusion. We introduced stress resilience and mental health training for managers, equipping leaders with the skills to support their teams more effectively and foster psychologically safe environments. In parallel, we delivered a series of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) awareness sessions, aimed at deepening understanding, challenging bias, and promoting a culture of belonging.

Our regional approach to professionalising the sector has progressed significantly, in line with the government’s competence and conduct standards. Colleagues have undertaken Level 4 and Level 5 housing management qualifications, bringing us closer to meeting sector-wide expectations and enhancing the capability of our workforce.

The successful embedding of our new behaviour framework has provided a consistent foundation for developing all aspects of our believe in people strategy. This framework continues to shape how we grow and support our colleagues.

This year we have achieved our goal of being 3 Star in our annual best companies survey. This reflects the hard work we have done in the past 12 months to listen to our colleagues. In 2024/25 we had an 86.5% response rate to our survey, which equates to 539 out of 623 employees, showing a high level of engagement. We made improvements across all eight engagement factors compared to last year, standouts being a 7% increase relating to ‘fair deal’, and a 4% increase in ‘leadership’, ‘my company’ and ‘wellbeing’.

As a business, we reported the average number of sick days per employee for 2024/25 to be 8.40 days, a decrease from 8.66 days in 2023/24. The graphs below show our performance regionally and nationally:

We partner with two external, independent employee assistance providers to provide support to employees in matters such as counselling, legal advice, bereavement assistance and general health and wellbeing advice such as family and financial problems.

We continue to pay the real living wage and continue to review the best way to reward our colleagues in a meaningful way, introducing a choice-based system where colleagues can select the benefits that best suit their circumstances. This has included the introduction of a new benefits platform, which gives colleagues an overview of the benefits they receive and where they can select additional options such as purchasing additional annual leave, while also highlighting the impact on the overall financial package.

The important role of women in our business continues to be reflected in the reduction in our gender pay gap. Our gender pay gap information is displayed below: