Listening to our tenants is the best way for us to improve our services. This is why we've worked with tenants to create 'My Voice', an opportunity to get involved and share feedback in a way that suits you best.
Our Scrutiny team run a variety of different groups and projects, and with My Voice, there are 5 key different areas that you can choose from to take part in and make a real difference. Tabitha, one of our Scrutiny Officers, has broken them down for us…
My Feedback
If you want to be involved in helping us shape our services but feel like you’re limited on time, joining our survey mailing list is a great way to get your voice heard.
In the Scrutiny team, we regularly circulate surveys to help us gain insight for projects we’re working on. For example, as part of a recent Scrutiny project on energy costs in our Retirement Living schemes, we sent a survey about energy habits to all of our retirement living residents and received 385 responses. This survey gave us some really valuable information and helped create an action plan to move forward with, shaped by tenant insight.
We know that not everybody has access to or feels confident using the internet; if this sounds like you but you’d still like to complete surveys for us, that’s not a problem! You have the option to sign up for postal surveys, which will come to you with a freepost envelope so you can send them back to us with no cost to yourself.
My Area
If you’re passionate about your area and want to help us keep your communal spaces safe and tidy, then our Estate Champion role might be a good fit for you. We currently have 72 registered Estate Champions, but we’re always looking for more!
Being an Estate Champion involves filling in a monthly report to let us know about any issues with services such as grounds maintenance and communal cleaning, as well as highlighting any anti-social behaviour affecting your building.
Our team work closely with our Estates and Tenancy Services teams to ensure that any issues flagged in the monthly reports are resolved quickly and effectively.
My Experience
Our My Experience groups provide a great opportunity to feed back to us about your own experiences and use these to make positive changes. My Experience groups generally occur on a “one-off” basis, like focus groups, and cover a wide variety of topics.
We recently ran a My Experience group for Shared Owners to understand how we can improve our communication and the overall service this group receives. The group ran in the evenings to fit in with working hours, and we received lots of constructive feedback.
If you’re interested in being part of My Experience, we’ll send you a monthly events calendar with any groups taking place that month. If there’s a group that sounds interesting to you, all you have to do is email us back letting us know that you’d like to attend – it’s as simple as that!
My Scrutiny
My Scrutiny is an area of My Voice that requires more of a time commitment but is invaluable in helping us review and improve our services.
As a member of My Scrutiny, you would sit on a Tenant Scrutiny Panel and attend regular meetings to do with a specific project, over a period of 3 months. This allows you to carry out an in-depth review of a particular area of our organisation. At the end of a scrutiny project, an action plan is created based on recommendations that we’ve worked with tenants to shape.
Currently, we have an ongoing My Scrutiny project looking at communication around repairs. Over the past year, we’ve looked at a range of similarly important projects including damp and mould, which has led to the creation of a damp and mould working group.
My Impact
If you want a direct way to hold us to account and ensure we’re doing what we say we will, My Impact is the group for you. The group meets 6 times per year and reviews a wide range of information to ensure that we’re on track with all of our projects and action plans.
The group is tenant-led, chaired by one of our Involved Tenants and they get to look at and scrutinise figures around our performance as an organisation, which really helps us to identify key areas for improvement.
There is some preparation required before each My Impact meeting; we send the agenda and paperwork out in advance so you can come prepared with any questions. We do try to make this as accessible as possible so please don’t feel put off if you haven’t done anything like this before!
For more information on becoming an Involved Tenant and the different ways you can take part, visit our My Voice page or get in touch with our Scrutiny team on customerscrutiny@midlandheart.org.uk
