Culture Change in Social Housing

When two of London's largest housing associations merged, the question wasn't just how to combine departments - it was how to create a single culture where 66,000 households would experience better, more human services. This project showed that culture change in social housing works best when it starts with what customers and colleagues actually need, not with what's written on a poster.

Peabody is one of the oldest and largest housing associations in the UK, and a member of the G15 group of London's biggest housing providers. Founded in 1862 by the American philanthropist George Peabody, its original aim was to improve the lives of people in need - making them better, happier and more comfortable. That purpose still drives the organisation today, now managing over 66,000 homes across London and the South East.

The project began as Peabody entered the early stages of a housing association merger with Family Mosaic, another large housing association. Like most mergers in social housing, the scale of change was significant - two organisations with different ways of working, different systems and different team cultures needed to become one.

But this wasn't just a structural exercise. Peabody wanted to put customer experience and a human-centred way of working at the heart of the merged organisation. The concern - shared by people at every level - was that growing bigger might mean losing the human touch. That's an issue in any sector, but especially in social housing, where organisations are responsible for people's homes and often support some of the most vulnerable in society.

Several things needed addressing together:

Two distinct organisational cultures needed combining - taking the best of both rather than imposing one on the other

• Previous change programmes from both organisations (around coaching culture, lean thinking and customer experience skills) needed building on, not discarding
• Staff needed to feel culture change was being done with them, not to them
• Customer experience needed protecting during a period of significant internal disruption

Both teams needed to start working together as one organisation rather than a "cut and shut" of two old ones

The goal was culture change in social housing that went beyond the usual approach of values campaigns and behaviour frameworks. Instead of telling people what the culture should be, the aim was to build it from the ground up - starting with what actually mattered to customers and colleagues.

Culture is really about "how we do things around here". The objective was to demonstrate culture through actions, behaviour and the way people are with customers - not through slogans. This meant designing culture change that people could see, feel and use in their daily work. Practical shifts in how services were designed, how teams worked together across the housing association merger, and how people communicated.

Understanding what really mattered

The work began with listening. Time spent with customers, frontline teams, senior management and the CEO gave a clear picture of what people valued and what was getting in the way. Customer analysis added depth to these conversations.

The strongest message from customers and colleagues alike was clear: put people - inside and outside the organisation - ahead of bureaucracy, process and system blockers. There was genuine concern that as the organisation grew through the housing association merger, it would lose its human touch.

Three practical drivers emerged from this research that would shape the entire culture change programme:

Give people closest to a problem the power to fix it

• Start with what really matters to customers

Challenge unnecessary bureaucracy

Agreeing principles upfront

A set of core culture change principles were agreed with the steering team. These acted as a decision framework - everything the programme did was checked against these criteria. Agreeing principles upfront proved a really effective way to speed up decision making and stay on course when other change was happening around the programme.

The principles were:

Everyone will have a voice - and a chance to make a difference

• It's about internal and external customers alike
• This will be co-designed with people - not imposed on them
• It won't be one-size-fits-all - teams would customise with support

The long-term aim is to give teams the tools to make this happen for themselves

Three questions that guided the culture change

Rather than a long list of values, the project distilled everything into three core questions every team could ask about their work:

Is our service designed around the needs of our customers?

• Are we working well with other teams and colleagues?

Are we being human and kind in the way we communicate?

These questions became the foundation for "People First" - Peabody's culture change programme. Each question led to a distinct strand of practical work that together shaped culture change in social housing across the merged organisation.

Starting with proof, not promises

"People First" was deliberately soft-launched with the exec and a range of frontline teams rather than the whole organisation. Too many change programmes fail because they start by telling people they need to change before demonstrating the benefits.

Ten high-priority challenges were selected as quick wins - things that could be completed quickly without disrupting business as usual, ranging from customer-focused improvements to working with HR to enhance the experience for colleagues. These gave the programme tangible proof points before anything was rolled out more widely.

Customer experience and service design

The first question - "Is our service designed around the needs of our customers?" - drove a focus on customer experience and service design across the merged housing association. As all services were being reviewed and redesigned during the merger, there was a natural opportunity to balance internal process and policy with a genuinely customer-centred approach to service design.

The project moved away from traditional satisfaction measurement and started exploring customer effort - how much work it took for customers to get what they needed - as a measure of success. An Effort Dashboard helped teams calculate the real cost of high-effort activity: how many days were being lost to unnecessary complexity, and where to focus first. Teams worked on practical ways to reduce the effort customers needed to get something done.

Internal effort was mapped too, as part of the cross-departmental working strand. This revealed significant wasted effort at every level of the organisation - energy that could be redirected toward things that actually mattered to customers.

Cross-departmental working and breaking down silos

The second question - "Are we working well with other teams and colleagues?" - tackled one of the hardest aspects of any housing association merger. Mergers naturally bring tribalism. High pressure, lots of change and uncertainty mean people revert to their own groups, which damages services and creates "us and them" dynamics.

A series of cross-departmental sessions brought people from across the organisation together to explore the three questions and find practical solutions. Initially these were opt-in sessions, which helped identify natural early adopters who could later become change champions.

Finding these champions was critical for making culture change in social housing self-sustaining rather than dependent on external support. In total, around 20% of the business engaged in these early sessions. They also proved valuable for gathering honest feedback about what was and wasn't working in the newly merged Peabody.

The longer-term plan was for champions across the business, supported by the Learning and Development team, to run these sessions with their own teams.

Human and kind communication

The third question - "Are we being human and kind in the way we communicate?" - started as a response to customer feedback about how both organisations communicated. Letters and notices could come across as hostile, confusing and unnecessarily formal. This made customer relationships harder and created tension where there didn't need to be any.

What began as a communication and tone of voice project grew into something bigger. "Human and kind" became a touchstone that teams used to test not just how they wrote, but how they behaved. It moved from a communication principle to a cultural one.

Supporting leadership to model the change

Culture change fails if leadership doesn't endorse, champion and demonstrate it. People First was launched with all levels of leadership and management at an away day where they could explore the key concepts and practical tools.

A leadership programme was developed with the internal Learning and Development team to give all leaders the skills to implement culture change in a human-centred way. A central idea was "closing the culture gap" - the distance between what the organisation says it values and what people actually experience. Leaders learned to use values as a practical problem-solving tool rather than something that lived on a poster. This included helping leaders apply People First in a coaching environment with their teams.

A series of "Leading the Way" workshops brought together Heads of Service and Directors who didn't normally work directly with one another - practical, problem-solving sessions where they could improve their service and cross-departmental working.

Giving managers practical tools

To support culture change in social housing at the team level, managers needed practical tools - not just principles. Although a question like "Is our service designed around the needs of our customers?" sounds simple, it actually involves a huge amount of work. It means listening to and genuinely understanding customers, knowing how to map service journeys, and running sessions with teams to find better ways of delivering.

A core toolkit for managers covered:

Customer experience, customer effort and service design - including a Customer Experience Scorecard that teams used to assess their service across the four dimensions of effort, working together, human and kind, and customer-led

• Cross-departmental working and problem solving

How to communicate in a simpler, more human and kind way

Specific teams also received tailored support on their particular service challenges - including care and support, customer complaints, service charges, rent collection and HR.

Rethinking performance management

Performance management frameworks become useless when they turn into a box-ticking exercise. The project shifted the focus from scores to creating good conversations - a move away from traditional performance reviews toward safe, honest conversations between peers.

For leadership, a simplified 360 review approach looked at the environment leaders created and whether this supported or blocked the three core areas of People First.

The culture change didn't happen through a single programme launch or a set of posters. It built gradually through practical changes that people could see working.

The three core questions became embedded in how Peabody operated - from team-level service reviews to organisation-wide customer insight. Customer experience measurement shifted to focus on effort and real-time feedback rather than retrospective satisfaction scores, giving teams clear, actionable insight into where they were doing well and where they could improve.

Cross-departmental problem solving became part of how things worked rather than something that needed a special initiative. The housing association merger that could have been defined by disruption and loss of identity instead became a catalyst for building something more intentional and human-centred than either organisation had been before.

Perhaps most tellingly, "human and kind" grew beyond a communication guideline into a genuine organisational test. Three years after the culture change programme launched, the three core questions around customer experience, working together and communication were part of the customer voice at both organisational and team level.

The programme moved from being externally supported to internally owned - with champions and the L&D team running sessions, managers using the toolkit in their teams, and leadership modelling the approach. A monthly Pulse Check gave teams a simple diagnostic across eight areas of culture change - from enabling environment and innovation to cross-team collaboration and customer focus - with a traffic light system to prioritise where to act. A CX Maturity Model mapped the journey from tactical, sporadic activity through to customer experience as something intrinsic to how the organisation works. Culture change in social housing became self-sustaining rather than consultant-dependent.

Most culture change programmes start with values - defining what the organisation should stand for, then hoping behaviour follows. This project took a different path. It started with service design, customer experience and the practical reality of how work actually happened across teams.

Culture change in social housing faces a particular challenge. Housing associations manage essential services for people who often have limited choice. The experience customers have isn't shaped by marketing - it's shaped by how a repair gets handled, how a complaint gets resolved, how a letter makes someone feel. Culture lives in those interactions, not in a strategy document.

This insight - that culture emerges from operational patterns, service interactions and team capability rather than from stated values - shaped much of the thinking behind the intentional ecosystems approach. When you change how services are designed and how teams work together, culture shifts as a natural consequence. You don't need to tell people what the culture is. They experience it.

For any housing association facing significant change - whether through merger, restructuring or regulatory pressure - the lesson is clear. Start with what people actually experience. Make the change practical and visible. Give people the tools to own it themselves. The culture follows.

The Regulator of Social Housing's Tenant Satisfaction Measures now require housing associations to report on exactly the kinds of outcomes this approach focused on - satisfaction with services, communication, and how landlords listen and act. What was forward-thinking in this project has become a regulatory expectation. Organisations that build culture change in social housing from the customer experience up are better positioned for that reality than those still relying on values statements and behaviour frameworks.