In the the first Wulvern Staff survey in 2011 only 47% of staff felt that they were paid fairly so Wulvern Housing have worked to improve this and in the 2013 survey they have improved this response to 67% of staff now feeling they are paid fairly in comparison to the external market. They have made this shift over two years by firstly in 2012 providing all staff with an information leaflet explaining how they benchmark salaries with the external market and how their budget is used across the business for pay awards. Feedback on this leaflet was that it was useful but staff would have preferred to have discussed it face to face and ask any additional questions there. Wulvern Housing accepted this and this year they held a series of drop-in pay workshops for staff. At these sessions they explained the process for benchmarking and calculating pay rises and then gave staff the opportunity to act as the leadership team and using a set of money make their own pay decisions for the business. The workshop concluded with a questions and answer session where staff could ask any questions or they could stay behind to ask specific questions about their own pay.

Managers hold informal one to ones with their staff and formal quarterly reviews and both of these are used as methods to thank staff for a job well done. Some Managers also choose to use team meetings as a way of thanking staff in front of their colleagues so everyone is aware of what they have done. One Manager has her own set of thank you cards and she takes the time to write a personal message to the staff member thanking them or praising them for the action they have taken. All of their Managers use the mantra that they would not ask any of their team to do something they would not do themselves.

Wulvern Housing support employee development by their internal coaching development programme - this year they have trained 10 managers to become coaches so they can help and develop staff from across the business. Each coach had to complete a two training course on the basics of coaching, undertake a minimum of 10 hours coaching practice and report on the benefits to the business and the individual of the coaching experience before being added to the coaching bank. The coaching bank are now used to support staff identified by Managers as wanting additional development to progress or where they need performance improvement support. Coaches are now working across the business with staff from all team including Apprentices, Rising Stars and general colleagues needing support. They intend to run their second cohort of coaches training in February to widen the scope of this resource as they want coaching to be a key way that managers support their teams to develop and learn to make decisions and decide actions for themselves. Additionally they run quarterly updates for their coaching bank to give them insights to other methods and style of coaching to give them flexibility and alternatives to the GROW model they learned on the initial two day course. December will see the coaches exploring the Time to Think philosophy and methodology developed by Nancy Kline.