Housing Innovation Community Update: May 2020

You may be busier than ever, adjusting to the new norm of working from home. You may be juggling childcare or other caring duties, even home schooling. All at a time of stress and uncertainty, personally, as well as for our colleagues and customers.  

Some things I have learned:  

• We can mobilise people and resources really quickly to respond when it’s needed.  

• People are fundamentally kind.  

• Working at home can be very productive if we do not fill up our days with video calls!  

• Let us not expect everything to go well – we are all doing our best and that is good enough.  

• Most of us seem to be up and running with technology – the harder part will be thinking more broadly about how we want our businesses to operate moving forward, what have we changed in the last few weeks that we’ll hold on to and grow?    

• Most of all, housing associations are at the front line of the crisis, supporting tenants and communities to adjust to the huge challenges they face. At SFHA, we are incredibly proud of the work you are doing to keep people safe and supported in their homes, continuing to deliver vital services and helping communities to pull together.   

The proverb ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ has never felt more pertinent! We are all innovating from necessity, and SFHA wants to help you to capture the learning as we go and become even more effective as we walk over the current ‘bridge’ into the new world. 

 Our members are starting to ask questions such as these, adapted from McKinsey   

• How will customer needs change as we head into a post-crisis ‘new normal’?  

• How will we create human interactions with people we won’t meet?  

• How will we repair devices we cannot touch or hold?  

• How do we create resilience in our supply chains?  

• How do we shift towards agile structures to handle a more volatile and dynamic world?  

• How do we introduce products and services in days or weeks, rather than months?  

In this extraordinary context, the SFHA Innovation and Future Thinking Programme is as important as ever in helping to answer some of these and other key questions.
 
Don’t forget to check out our Innovation Hub where you’ll find lots of articles, case studies, videos and, hopefully, inspiration.