Location: Central office is in Coventry, with other locations including a Maidstone, Norwich and Stratford-upon-Avon office
Number of employees: 1,200
Case study focus: The importance of HR maintaining control over its digital technologies
The company
Orbit is one of the largest housing providers in the UK, managing around 39,000 homes. It provides rented homes, supported housing (including for mothers and babies, ex-offenders, homeless people, victims of domestic violence and individuals with mental health issues), sheltered and very-sheltered schemes, private retirement homes, low-cost home ownership options and new build development through Orbit Homes.
It also provides specialist back office function services, such as internal audit, ICT systems and procurement, to housing and private sector organisations through its Service Matters arm.
The challenge
It’s no secret that the last five years have been tough for anyone at the receiving end of public sector austerity. This has included the Orbit Group, a collective of not-for-profit housing associations operating across the Midlands, East Anglia and the South East.
“We have over the last two or three years been through a big period of transformation, there have been a lot of changes in the housing association environment, what with the housing crisis and big changes in terms of social security,” reports HR director Trudi Bluck. “It’s meant that we as a sector have needed to transform and make ourselves more commercial.”
The strategy
A key part of this new commerciality has been Orbit’s ‘Digital by Default’ strategy, an approach designed to make the organisation as lean, efficient and data savvy as possible. HR systems needed to be included in this technology overhaul, with the function conscious not to fall into the trap such a shiny new strategy, and the increased focus and resource on digital expertise this brings, of surrendering ownership of its own, now-digitalised processes completely to IT.
Instead the HR and IT departments have fostered a partnership approach, aided in no small part by its HR software provider MidlandHR and its iTrent technology. “We looked at our systems and we needed to become more digital ourselves. We needed to do things like take away paper pay slips, and use data in more useful ways to the business,” says Bluck.
“We made the decision to have a systems person in our team because it’s really important that HR doesn’t abdicate responsibility for technology,” she says, adding that: “It’s easy to think you have a set of priorities and you just need someone else in the business to translate them for you,” but that this often leads to the wrong systems being selected.
“Clearly we couldn’t do this in isolation so collaboration was absolutely key,” she says. “At the start of the project we all went to the big technology shows and then HR and IT worked on the specs together.”
HR keeping strongly involved with digitisation of its own processes has benefits beyond initial selection of technology though. Close involvement with the procurement process means HR knows the systems inside out and so can deliver strong training and support.
Bluck adds that HR working closely with employees to research their needs hugely impacts subsequent employee buy-in. “We’re a traditional housing association but we also sell professional services, so our workforce is very diverse and a good proportion have no IT knowledge and limited access to systems, as they may work in care or be gardeners for instance,” says Bluck.
“But I think if people feel like they’ve contributed to a new system you get much more buy-in and a much better understanding of it,” she says, reporting that so far this has certainly been the encouraging result.
