About North Hertfordshire Homes

NHH has an active Health and Wellbeing programme called Nutrition Health Happiness. The programme supports and improves the health and wellbeing of their employees by offering a wide range of activities promoting positive links between health and work designed to reduce absence rates, improve performance, motivation and morale and create a positive working environment. This helps attract and retain the best staff. They deploy a mobile health monitor across their workplaces that measures height and weight, calculate body mass index and blood pressure. It is fully automatic and produces a print out. The printed ticket carries reference information regarding the normal body mass index reading and World Health Organisation recommendations on blood pressure. NHH offer fun ‘tasters’ leading to more substantial programmes. The most recent have been Pilates, salsa and yoga, combining fun, team building and health benefits.

NHH are working with the local community in all sorts of ways. A top priority at the moment is helping people to assess access digital technology in the home or locally. Their aim is to find out what restricts people from using it, whether it be things like the cost of a machine, Wi-Fi related costs or lack of skills. NHH have recruited and trained Digital Champions from the local community who help people make use of the internet etc. They are also working with three local schools, attending assemblies to find out about their digital use, advise them on keeping safe online and asking their parents to complete a questionnaire about their use of and knowledge of the internet. This questionnaire has also been completed by users of Job Centre Plus so they should get a cross selection of insights they can work on through the multi-agency digital group they have established to improve access for all. Another great community initiative they are developing is recruiting tenant scrutineers who inspect their estates using a specially developed app on I-pads to check the standard of cleaning, maintenance etc. and who mystery shop their services so they get direct feedback on what they do well and need to improve. This not only helps improve services it gives the tenants real skills they can use in further training or employment.

North Hertfordshire Homes have an Above and Beyond employee recognition scheme which incorporates both an Extra Mile Award scheme and a Bright Idea Award. The Extra Mile Award is to celebrate employees whose exceptional work needs to be recognised. Worthy recipients are nominated by their colleagues and the Executive Team selects a winner each month. The Bright Idea Award is to encourage staff to come forward with their own ideas for how things could be done better. Each month the Executive Management Team discusses all of the ideas submitted (of which there are many) and selects worthy winners – sometimes more than one. The CEO writes to everyone submitting an idea but not a winner thanking them for the submission and explaining why they could not implement the idea, but making clear how important it is to come up with suggestions as the debates at EMT often throw up all sorts of interesting thoughts and solutions. There are always great ideas, and often these are simple things they had not thought of. North Hertfordshire Homes track carefully that the winning ideas get implemented. The awards are presented to the employee by one of the members of their executive team in front of their colleagues and they receive a warm round of applause. The employee receives a certificate and a £25 voucher and they have their photo placed on posters around the organisation and on the intranet.