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Facilitation skills training benefits housing association

A facilitative style of leadership can help organisations to improve performance and enhance their overall service, according to Bedfordshire Pilgrims Housing Association, which manages over 10,000 homes in and around Bedfordshire.

The association, which manages homes in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes, commissioned executive education and research organisation Roffey Park to deliver a three-day facilitation skills programme for its 56 managers. An independently-administered staff survey shows that this training has helped Bedfordshire Pilgrims to create a more positive team dynamic, while improving line management relations, communications and the overall job satisfaction of employees.

"After assessing the goals and values of the organisation, and co-ordinating their operational and business plans, our managers prioritised facilitation skills and performance management as their most pressing development needs," said Rosie Stevens, Head of HR and Organisation Development at Bedfordshire Pilgrims.

"Facilitation can be the difference between an ineffective company and a really high performing organisation. When team members are able to resolve issues and make decisions together, they feel far more involved and more motivated. This can translate into big improvements in effectiveness."

Before tackling facilitation, the association ran performance management training initiatives to help its managers better understand their own management style and the implications involved when managing different team members. It also provided training on coaching and giving and receiving feedback.

Rosie Stevens then met with Roffey Park to discuss a practical development programme on facilitation, team processes and change management.

"Facilitation is one of Roffey Park’s core strengths," she said. "We wanted to tap into their expertise and develop a programme that combined theoretical input with plenty of opportunities for people to practice the skills."

Roffey Park designed a three-day residential programme covering the different styles and interventions of facilitation. Called Facilitating Effective Teams, it showed how facilitative leaders can improve group dynamics, develop team trust and handle challenges, such as confronting difficult group members. It also highlighted issues such as team development, team roles, measuring effectiveness and managing change, particularly understanding the human responses to change and overcoming resistance. The programme was delivered at Roffey Park for groups of eight managers at a time.

"Feedback from the programme has been excellent," said Rosie Stevens. "People are using the techniques and they have also benefited from greater self awareness and increased understanding of team processes and change."

When Bedfordshire Pilgrims conducted a comprehensive survey of its 277 staff, it found a clear link between its organisational development initiatives and business improvements within the organisation. Undertaken by a specialist research company, the survey investigated staff perceptions of their work and their working lives. The staff survey explored areas such as teamwork and recognition; workload, resources and pressure; training and career development; performance feedback and appraisals; communication, information and contributing views; team meetings; line management, senior management style and service to customers.

When analysing the results, the research company also provided benchmarking data from other housing associations as well as organisations in other sectors, such as finance, retail and government bodies.

"Our staff survey results put us way above the housing association average and consistently higher than the average of all sectors," said Rosie Stevens. "We found that people are proud to work for us, they think their line managers are good managers, they understand how their contribution fits into the whole, they find appraisals useful and they’re happy with the training they receive. Certainly the facilitation programme and the managing performance work have contributed very substantially to these results."

Rosie Stevens is now aiming to consolidate the facilitation work. "We still have a lot of work to do," she said. "People don’t just turn into wonderful facilitators overnight. Part of my role now is to work alongside our managers to help them embed the learning and further improve in the future."

To help with this objective, Rosie Stevens took part in a five-day open programme which Roffey Park runs for all experienced facilitators, called The Art of Facilitation.

"The programme was a lot of fun and extremely useful," she said. "It challenges your thinking and your behaviour in a very constructive way and it lets you reflect on your practice as a facilitator and the impact you have. This is another way of accessing the expertise at Roffey Park and I found it was great to work with expert facilitators and to learn about other people’s experiences. The learning will help me personally and it will benefit the association in the future as well."

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