The Golden Thread: How Caledonia Housing Association Transformed Its Culture

"It’s about having a golden thread so that everyone can make that connection between what they’re doing day-to-day and how that impacts our overall purpose." - Anna Boag, Head of People, Culture & Communications, Caledonia Housing Association

Purpose has always been central to Caledonia Housing Association. Like many social housing providers, its colleagues are motivated by making a positive difference to people's lives through safe, affordable homes and thriving communities. As Caledonia Housing Association grew and evolved maintaining cross-departmental communication, employee wellbeing and organisational clarity became a top priority.

By pairing data-led insights from Best Companies with transparent leadership and active employee forums, Caledonia has strengthened its culture, achieving 2-Star Best Companies Accreditation and outperforming sector benchmarks across key engagement metrics.

Breaking Down Silos & Building Connection

Caledonia's people work across 26 communities, each with its own unique needs, aspirations and local priorities. Bringing colleagues together across teams and locations, while ensuring everyone understood how their role contributed to the organisation's purpose, was a key challenge. Creating a 'golden thread' that connected colleagues to each other, the organisation's strategy and the customers they serve became central to Caledonia's culture transformation.

To achieve this, Caledonia focused on creating structured, meaningful channels for colleagues to connect, collaborate and shape organisational improvement, most notably through their highly active employee representative forum, Your Voice.

"It’s the most engaged forum of its kind that I've worked with in my career. There's huge engagement from the CEO and executive team right down to colleagues in frontline roles. We take our overall survey feedback to 'Your Voice' and work collaboratively to update our organisational action plan”, explains Anna.

Alongside Your Voice, Caledonia introduced bi-annual leadership roadshows following business plan updates. Senior leaders visit offices and schemes to run interactive workshops, helping colleagues - from an estate operative working in the community to a finance officer supporting services behind the scenes - understand how their role contributes to the organisation's strategy and the difference it makes to customers' lives.

Supporting Wellbeing: Service With Respect

Working on the frontline of social housing can carry significant emotional weight. Supporting customers through financial hardship, complex personal circumstances and challenging situations can sometimes lead colleagues to tolerate unacceptable behaviour out of a strong sense of duty, often at the expense of their own wellbeing.

Through feedback surfaced in working groups, Caledonia identified that frontline staff needed clearer backing and boundaries. They introduced the ‘Service With Respect’ framework.

• Clear guidance: Frontline staff do not have to tolerate aggressive or abusive behaviour.
• Public commitment: Transparent customer messaging on phones, websites, and tenant newsletters.
• Internal support: Streamlined reporting through the Health & Safety portal with board endorsement.

"We introduced a new framework called 'Service with Respect, Respect Our Service'”, Anna says. “It’s a philosophy on our website and in tenant newsletters, backed up by internal policy.  At a Health, Safety and Wellbeing Committee meeting, a Board member made it clear that staff should never feel they are expected to tolerate abusive or threatening behaviour. Having that endorsement from the top was incredibly powerful."

Alongside this framework, Caledonia maintains a robust mental health first-aider network, achieving a 1:10 ratio across the organisation, and actively promotes employee assistance schemes through video walk-throughs and team roadshows to destigmatise mental health support.

Demystifying Reward: Achieving an 8% Edge on Fair Deal

A standout result in Caledonia’s survey data is their Fair Deal score, which has risen 9% since 2022 and sits 8% higher than the sector average.

Caledonia attributes this success to complete transparency and proactive communication rather than pay increases alone.

"As a relatively close-knit sector, social housing organisations are naturally compared with one another. However, perceptions of a fair deal are often shaped by comparisons of individual benefits rather than the employee offer as a whole. A more meaningful assessment considers the full package, with pay, benefits, flexibility, wellbeing support and pension provision working together to create value for colleagues."

To ensure clarity:

• Annual Personal Benefit Statements: Caledonia issues a color-coded one-pager comparing their package against independent UK housing sector benchmarking data. Staff can see where their benefits are equal to or above market standards.
• Data-Led Governance: A Remuneration Committee regularly reviews pay and benefits against market data to keep the proposition competitive.
• Employee-Driven Perks: Feedback from employee forums directly led to enhanced paternity leave, introduced volunteering days, electric car leasing and cycle-to-work schemes.

How Best Companies Supported Caledonia’s Journey

For Caledonia Housing Association, partnering with Best Companies provided the independent insight and robust data needed to turn colleague feedback into meaningful action. Rather than relying on assumptions, the organisation has used survey results to shape priorities, strengthen leadership and continuously improve the colleague experience.

1. Data-Driven Action Planning: Best Companies data allows Caledonia to look beyond high-level numbers and identify specific heat spots or manager-level dynamics. By examining scores across job roles and teams, HR business partners can facilitate constructive, tailored action planning sessions.
2. A Common Language for Improvement: The Best Companies framework provides managers and teams with a shared language for discussing culture and engagement. The 1 + 3 Method^TM (one area to celebrate, three areas to improve) equips team leaders to open meaningful dialogues about workload, communication, and management style.
3. Employer Brand & Pride: Achieving and maintaining 2-Star status serves as a point of pride for existing staff and a powerful recruitment tool. Caledonia embeds its accreditation into job adverts, candidate interviews, and internal celebrations.

As Anna states, "Best Companies gives us a really structured way of engaging.  The survey results are like opening a window, helping us see more clearly what’s happening across the organisation. Our managers are now much more confident in using that perspective to understand what’s working and where we can grow”.

‍