About Wheatley Housing Group Ltd.

The Senior Management Team promote excellence, community, trust and ambition in everything they do. They empower and encourage staff to raise the bar for customers and deliver excellence through team meetings, speaking at Managers’ forums and other staff events, as well as by talking informally to staff. When it comes to community, they regularly visit Wheatley’s communities to engage with staff and residents, particularly when they hold events to celebrate improvements in neighbourhoods, such as the launch of new homes or a programme to upgrade existing homes. They are always ambitious to do more for their communities and they lead this activity both strategically and by encouraging staff to focus on designing and delivering excellent services for customers. The senior team have been instrumental in setting up the Wheatley Foundation, a new charitable trust which distributes grant funding to community, employability and digital inclusion projects. They also led on the successful campaign to attract £300m new funding on the public bond markets to enable the organisation to build thousands of new and affordable homes in their communities. Additionally Wheatley Group has developed a new environmental training programme – the Changing Lives programme - aimed at unemployed customers who are experiencing difficulty securing employment due to lack of work history, offending background, disability etc. The Wheatley Group Apprenticeship programme targets young people from communities who have been disadvantaged, are less likely to be engaged in schools and are furthest away from the job market. In 2016 they have taken on 86 split into business admin, housing, horticulture, sustainable resource management (environmental) and for the first time this year they have created care apprenticeships, as they see this as a growing opportunity for jobs.

Wheatley’s five-year strategy involves ‘Investing in Futures’. At a corporate level – for stakeholders and funders – it’s a smart document which tells a group story with group outcomes. At a local level, they told the story of what it would mean in individual communities. The organisation call this their ‘locality plans’, but for staff they turned the strategy, with their vision for the next five years, into at-a-glance pocket-sized guides, which rallied colleagues round their five big aims and values. Each staff-facing version translated the vision into how the individual partner organisation would realise the vision and what their priorities would be. It was then distributed to each staff member. In this way they created the sense of one strategy and vision uniting the whole group but with each part of the family having a sense they owned the strategy and had made it their own. They use their mission statement everywhere internally and externally and values also have major prominence on their intranet, digital screens and staff newsletters.

Wheatley Group’s approach to rewarding people has been reviewed with the employee voice. This has resulted in what is now called the W.E. Reward and W.E. Benefits, with an extensive package and approach to reward and recognition now in place. WE Benefits contains an extensive range of benefits that people can draw from to suit need and choice, for example health services and insurance, contribution to eye and dental care, cycle to work support, the ability to buy extensions to annual leave, study leave, funding for education and qualifications, paid summer work placements for family and friends, salary sacrifice for childcare vouchers, discount vouchers with a range of retailers, the option to buy technology and digital equipment at discounts and pay from salary interest free via an employer scheme, discounted legal and conveyancing services, a counselling service and much more.