2

We are committed to help organisations drive improvement through the EFQM Excellence Model, a

comprehensive management framework used by over 30,000 organisations in Europe. To help you

implement our Model, we provide training and assessment tools as well as recognition for high

performing organisations. But our real talent comes from gathering good practices and integrating

those within our portfolio. We at EFQM, a not-for-profit membership Foundation, aim to share what

works, through case studies, online seminars, working groups, conferences and thematic events.

Sharing our member’s enthusiasm, their motivation and the results they achieve; that is what we

work for.

We would like to thank everyone at Glasgow Housing Association for their support in preparing this

case study.

3

In line with our promise, to “Share What Works”, EFQM is a uniquely placed to identify good

practices that have been adopted by our members. The EFQM Recognition Schemes, which involve

independent assessors visiting applicants, help us to identify, verify and share these practices within

the EFQM Members. In 2010, we launched the Good Practice Competition to enable any

organisation, regardless of whether it is a member of EFQM or one of our Partner Organisations, to

share an approach that works for them.

The applicants are asked to upload a short video explaining their approach. A Jury of experts in the

field then agrees on a short-list of finalists. The final judging process is a combination of a public

vote, via the web portal, and the Jury’s votes, after the finalists have presented their practice in

more detail.

The theme of the competition changes each year in line with the focus of the EFQM Forum; an

annual event for business leaders and the excellence community to share ideas, experiences and

knowledge.

The concept of ‘New Ways of Working’ has become synonymous with flexible working, virtual

cooperation and even change management. Business cases for investments in new technology and

business processes to enable flexible working tend to focus on cost reduction and increased

productivity. But increasingly people are demanding greater flexibility in how, where and when they

work - and this doesn't just apply to "digital natives".

The competition was organised in association with the European Workplace Innovation Network, a

project funded by the European Commission.

Congratulations to the Winners of the EFQM Good Practice Competition 2013:

2013 Winner : Glasgow Housing Association, UK - Think Yes

2013 Highly Commended : Bursagaz, Turkey - Live Mobile and Be Socialised Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany - On the way to Enterprise 2.0 with Bosch Connect

2013 Finalist:

Mutualia, Spain – Lidera Project

4

Glasgow Housing Association (GHA) is a Registered Social Landlord (RSL), a not-for-profit

organisation, a limited liability company, and a registered charity. We provide services to almost

67,000 people across Glasgow, owning and managing 41,000 rented properties. We are both the

largest provider of social rented housing in Scotland. Since 2012, GHA has become the largest

subsidiary of Wheatley Group, a new organisation formed to ensure a sustainable and growing

business in the current environment. GHA’s turnover is approximately £185 million per year of

which £150m is generated through core housing, and £35m through other sources.

Our leaders have set a clear

direction through our vision of

“Better homes, Better lives, a

Better Glasgow.” Our core

business is to rent properties to

individual customers as their home

and provide those customers with

a range of property and

neighbourhood services such as

repairs, cleaning common areas

and support services to ensure

they have a nice place to live and

can sustain their tenancy. As a

Social Landlord, our priority is to provide housing to those “in need”, including vulnerable customers

and those who would struggle to afford the private rented market or to own their own property. The

role of Social Landlords in Scotland is defined in legislation and regulated by an independent

Government body. We provide services through our Customer Service Centre (CSC), City Centre

based shop and a network of community based offices, called Local Housing Organisations. We have

approximately 1600 staff members across Glasgow, in 28 local housing offices and 2 corporate

offices. Our key challenges include continuing to improve business performance through a poor

economic climate, reducing costs to enable us to do more for our customers and invest in our assets

and responding to welfare reform which is reducing our customers’ income and may make it harder

for them to pay their rent.

5

Our Organisation is passionate about

delivering a dynamic and comprehensive

service to its customers and continually

looks to enhance these services. There

are many examples of changes that have

been made with the specific purpose of

adding value to our customers. For

example, the creation of our Customer

Service Centre which operates 24/7

where all routine enquiries are directed,

freeing up time and allowing Housing

Officers more time in dialogue with our

customers. In order to meet the

diverse needs of our client group, GHA

recognises that “change” within the

organisation is crucial and in order to

deliver change, it is important to pay

attention not only to the tools and

business processes available, but to

focus on equipping and enabling staff to

make the change a reality.

One of the major changes to be

implemented is our “Think Yes”

initiative, which following its success in 4

Pilot Offices, was rolled out across GHA

in September 2012. “Think Yes” is about

empowering our staff to make personalised solutions for each customer, using their initiative and

professional judgement and resolving customer issues “on the spot”. Our staff take a great deal of

pride in ensuring that any “blockages” for effective service delivery are removed and share these

“solutions” with each other. As a result of “Think Yes”, staff have become more confident and

continually strive to delight our customer which is reflected in the increase in customer satisfaction.

6

Our customers matter to us - we want them to be happy with the services we provide. While we had

relatively high levels of customer satisfaction, we’d set ourselves an ambitious target of delivering

customer satisfaction of 90% or above by 2013/14. Research has consistently shown that high

performing organisations have employees with high levels of satisfaction who are engaged with the

organisation, its values and its strategy. To build this trust and confidence with our people, we have

created our “Think Yes” culture.

“Think Yes” is reflected in everything we do from our leadership and management approach through

to the ways in which we manage our policies and processes. It is a mindset we empower all our

people to adopt when serving our customers, with the role of managers and leaders becoming to

realise the potential of their people and remove blockages that stop our staff being able to say yes at

the first point of contact.

We have systematically

identified areas where staff

have felt they have had to

escalate issues for a

management decision

rather than resolve them

themselves and we have

sought to remove the

reasons for these, both real

and perceived. For example,

staff were sometimes saying

no to customers because

they perceived that there

was not adequate budget to

deliver solutions or home

improvements when actually, looking across budgets, solutions were easily affordable. To overcome

this, our leaders have had a number of sessions with all front-line staff and put in place new ways of

managing budgets locally.

We have further aligned our operational staffing structures to better create an operating

environment that will enable our staff to say yes. This has involved putting more staff on the front

line and enabling them to make quick and personalised decisions for our customers at the first point

of contact. We created clearer accountability for every housing officer for customers in their patch,

and reduced layers of local management which significantly reduced staffing costs. An efficiency

saving of £1.5million was estimated as a result of flatter structures. However, this has been

exceeded and the actual saving was £3.4million.

7

This enabled housing officers to know, build relationships and add value to customers, as set out in

our Customer Excellence and Better Lives strategies. We analysed all call handling that was

happening locally through our “Think Yes” pilots and identified that over 70% of this was

transactional in nature. Given this, we have now routed all customer calls through our Customer

Service Centre in the first instance, making for a more efficient and effective service for our

customers. All managers are now provided with advice and support to make “Think Yes” real for

them, as we move away from our old style of management. This has included a new focus on

management development at our monthly Managers forums and a dedicated leadership programme

based on best practice in emotional intelligence. The evaluation has shown that this has opened

managers’ minds to new ways of building positive relationships with staff and this, in turn, is leading

staff to build stronger relationships with customers. GHA now has leaders who create the space

through coaching and mentoring for staff to manage themselves and take responsibility and

accountability for delighting our customers.

The culture programme has been fully implemented across the organisation with all managers and

leaders trained. We have had a range of sessions with staff with different formats used for different

staff Groups. The Executive Team have held road shows, visiting every local office to understand

how “Think Yes” was being implemented and whether there were any systemic blockages that

meant our staff could not say yes. Feedback was that everyone was excited and on board with the

direction and are looking for ways to make it happen and say yes to our customers.

We ensure a consistent approach to providing and developing services through our vision of “Better

Homes, Better Lives, A Better Glasgow“ and the five big aims for our organisation which are:

Deliver Excellent Services at every point of contact

Provide and Maintain Quality Homes

Empower Communities-Wellbeing and Opportunity

Value for Money through innovation and joint working

Empowering People to create a make-it-happen culture

8

We have defined a customer excellence strategy which sets out how we will reach 90% customer

satisfaction by 2013/14, while continuing to reduce our overall costs.

“Think Yes” creates a more efficient operating model – both through shifting transactional service

provision to our Customer Service Centre and (over the longer-term) online – and through

empowering our staff to deliver a right first time service that reduces failure such as complaints and

repeat work. “Think Yes” further continues to build the trust and confidence of our staff with our

organisation which, research shows, helps to improve performance. It further enables our locally

based staff to get closer to the customer and build stronger relationships through demonstrating

they can deliver on their priorities, very important for GHA as many of our customers are impacted

by welfare reform.

A major factor in Glasgow, particularly the communities we provide services to, is poverty.

Compared to much of Scotland and the UK, we operate in many of the poorest areas with high

unemployment, low mortality rates and poor health. Blanket standardised services don’t cut it - our

customers have very different needs which often need dealt with immediately. Think Yes has

allowed us to deliver person centred services at the first point of contact. Customer profiling has

been key to the success, the more staff know about the customer the more customers will assume

that they know what they are doing. Systematic and structured consultation and research about our

customers and communities has given staff the information they need to relate to each customer as

an individual and provide personalised services.

The level of communication across the organisation has provided emotional buy in and employees

are more effective and positive, we share the vision of “Think Yes”. Our employees are more

accountable because they assume responsibility for the overall effectiveness of the organisation.

They see how they fit into the big picture and understand that their actions impact the entire

organisation. Employees do make mistakes, but they learn from them and move on.

9

The “Think Yes” initiative was first introduced to GHA staff as a pilot project in four GHA offices in

July 2011. It was piloted in four of our frontline teams, one from each geographical location – north,

south, east and west of Glasgow.

Martin Armstrong, our Chief Executive, visited each office and asked staff to use their professional

judgment to deliver what our customers wanted. Out went waiting for decisions from managers and

in came quick action - at the first point of contact with customers. At this stage, we deliberately set

no boundaries. Staff had to interpret Think Yes themselves and apply it in a way that suited their

individual customers. Their only direction was to do what the customer wanted and to not break the

law. Housing Officers were nervous at first but they soon found their feet. They spent more time

with existing customers and established strong relationships with new customers.

The experiments were a huge success with fully empowered Housing Officers thoroughly enjoying

their new operational freedom; better engaging with existing tenants and establishing strong

relationships with new tenants. Business performance improved, staff morale improved and there

was no significant rise in local spend. The staff who were involved in the pilots became ambassadors

for Think Yes in both the internal communications campaign and in the training sessions during

Better Futures week, an event for all staff that launched Think Yes across GHA.

“Think Yes” was introduced to the organisation in the February 2012 edition of Your News - our staff

newsletter. This was followed by an internal campaign and Better Futures week in May. Initial

communications set the scene – explaining what had happened in the pilots and how it had

improved customer satisfaction and, more importantly for our colleagues, how it empowered staff

to make the right decisions. Better Futures week was the official launch of Think Yes for all staff.

Groups of around 70-80 colleagues attended each session in our training Academy. Through careful

scheduling and targeted communication, every member of staff attended one of the sessions. The

Executive Team led every session. The question issued to all employees was “why do we say no to

the people who, (in paying their rents) pay our wages?” Colleagues then attended smaller

workshops where staff from the Think Yes pilots outlined the huge changes that had resulted from

their experiments. It was an inspirational experience for colleagues.

All staff were asked to go back to their roles with a new, “Think Yes” attitude. Managers participated

in a three day development programme called ‘Trust and Confidence’ in order to develop their skills

and behaviours as “Think Yes” leaders. To maintain impetus our award winning Holmes intranet site

has facilitated excellent communication across GHA. Effective, positive problem solving has been a

key element of a “Think Yes” culture, communication is open and free flowing. There is give and

take between teams and customers and effective listening which promotes solutions.

10

The programme was unusual in that there was no

formal training before the pilot, staff had to interpret

“Think Yes” themselves and apply it in a way that

suited the customers best, it is about meeting

individual needs and personalising services to meet

them. Strict procedures and protocol at this stage

would have stifled creativity so to make “Think Yes”

work and delight our customers, staff are empowered

to explore options to allow us to say yes. The key

challenge was to convince staff that it was okay to say

yes without asking permission. The role of our Chief

Executive and Senior Team was key in providing that

trust and confidence to staff. Many staff and managers

were worried that Think Yes would present real risks

to GHA and inconsistency in service. Quite the

contrary happened - we never over spent our budget,

our original trust in our staff and our customers paid

off, our staff are happier our customers are happier

and more than that we are positive about the way

forward for the organisation.

11

Staff satisfaction across the 4 pilot areas has improved since “Think Yes” pilots mainly due to

being able to say Yes to our customers (see table listed above)

Staff feels more satisfied with their job in the “Think Yes” pilot offices (83%)

Customer satisfaction levels are continuing to improve (87%)

Staff satisfaction, following the organisation wide launch, improved across GHA (85%)

Due to flatter structures at the frontline we have saved £3.4 million from our staffing budget

Listed below are two stories demonstrating the impact of “Think Yes” for our customers and

communities we serve:

John Bill, Environmental Team Leader in the South Area was called to a customer’s home one

Saturday afternoon. The customer – a mother of young children - reported broken glass in her

garden. The customer had multiple sclerosis and was struggling to clean up the glass herself. John

jumped in the van, taking his brush and shovel with him and had the garden cleaned in no time. The

customer was delighted that the job was done within an hour of reporting it.

Paul Watts from the mobile night team helped an elderly gentleman in Castlemilk who needed to

have his old washing machine removed from his top-floor flat. The customer had a new washing

machine delivered to his top floor flat in Dougrie Terrace but the delivery company refused to uplift

his old one. The customer approached the night mobile team when they were removing bulk from

his back court. The team not only removed the washing machine, they took it to the local scrap yard

to be recycled and gave the cash to our charity of the year.

12

In October 2011, key staff from the four pilot areas met with Martin Armstrong and the other

Executive Directors to give their honest feedback on the “Think Yes” pilot.

This meeting was pivotal in the design process for the organisation-wide campaign. Feedback given

by staff showed how embracing “Think Yes” transformed the customer/staff relationship.

This, in turn, helped the organisation make the decisions which allowed “Think Yes” to take to be

embedded across GHA. These were:

Housing Officers to be key decision-makers

Housing Managers to support staff in making decisions, removing blockages to thinking yes and

helping staff develop in their role

Re-organisation of support staff to better allow Housing staff to fully Think Yes

The Executive Team then went out again in November/ December 2012 visiting all local teams to

check that the deployment of Think Yes had been effective, including new front-line structures which

underpinned the new ways of working. The feedback was that “Think Yes” had become part of the

culture and that this was leading to services designed around the customer at the point of

transaction. This feedback was recently played back through an external assessment for Customer

Service Excellence, the UK cabinet office’s standard for customer service, and through Investors In

People, where GHA received the Gold standard.

13

The objectives of ‘Think Yes’ are to:

Improve customer satisfaction levels by asking staff to think positively when faced with a

customer request or problem

Improve staff satisfaction by empowering them to make decisions for customers and promote

ownership and trust

Put more staff on the front line enabling them to make quick decisions for our customers at the

first point of contact

Get to know, build relationships and add value for our customers, as set out in our Customer

Excellence and Better Lives strategies

Deliver personalised services to meet individual need

Streamline more efficient operating structures designed to generate savings which can be

reinvested in further improving customer experience

As can be seen in the results section, we have met these objectives, our customers and staff are

more satisfied with quality of service and our staff are more motivated, feel valued, are proud to

work for GHA and are satisfied with their job. This has been a resounding success; research has

proven that happy, motivated staff with a positive attitude are far more productive.

14

This table shows how people satisfaction has improved in the four “Think Yes” pilot areas from a

PULSE survey conducted a couple of years ago:

Pulse Survey “Think yes” offices (%)

I feel valued for the work I do 48 66%

I feel motivated to do a good job 60 82%

I plan to be working at GHA in 12 months time 87 94%

I would recommend GHA as a good place to work 70 88%

How satisfied are you with your job 69 83%

I am proud to work for GHA 79 86%

Overall in our most recent independent staff survey people satisfaction has again increased this year

to 85%. In terms of the impact on customers our customer satisfaction levels continue to improve as

“Think Yes” is embedded across the City of Glasgow.

15

EFQM is a membership organisation. We rely on input, ideas and suggestions from you to create a

vibrant community. Without the contributions of our members, the network would not work. These

are some of the ways you can contribute:

We created The EFQM Network for Sustainable Excellence to facilitate a dialogue between our

peers and the wider community. The group is open to anyone with an interest in this area. Over

4000 individuals have already joined our group and shared their experiences. If you’ve got a

question, it’s a great place to start.

Organisations can join the EFQM member community and enjoy some exclusive benefits such as

access to free assessment and improvement tools, participation to events, themed webinars and

good practice visits.

To learn more about our member community, feel free to contact us or to join one of the free

introduction meetings at our offices in Brussels.

As a member of EFQM, you will enjoy the following exclusive benefits:

Expert advice and support for your organisation’s journey towards excellence.

Access to the EFQM Knowledge Base is a database containing a number of free to download

assessment, management and improvement tools; as well as Good Practices identified from

the last 3 years of the EFQM Excellence Awards.

Members receive a discount of 20% on EFQM Products & Services, including Training,

Publications and Recognition.

There are themed events and webinars throughout the year, with Good Practices and new

tools being shared and explained by EFQM and member organisations.

For more information, please e-mail us at info@efqm.org

16

EFQM

Avenue des Olympiades 2

1140 Brussels, Belgium

Tel: +32 2 775 35 11

Fax: +32 2 775 35 96

info@efqm.org

www.efqm.org

© EFQM 2013

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (be

this electronically, mechanically, through photocopy, or recording or otherwise) without either the prior written permission

of, or a licence permitting restricted copying, and use for a third party, from the publisher.