Greenacre Group Update
Layering Up and Letting Go
A Happy New Year and welcome to our Winter edition newsletter. Here you’ll find the latest insights on Housing Employment and Leadership Development, as well as news from our Recruitment, Executive and Leadership Consultancy experts, and the latest housing jobs.
It’s been a tough winter for people across the UK, and no one can blame those not feeling quite ready to embrace 2023. Many are facing continuous struggle as the cost-of-living crisis impacts tenants and employees alike. As we move forward, it will be important to know what to take with us as we navigate the coming year, what to layer up on, and what to leave behind, both personally and professionally, in order to create the space to thrive and grow.
We continue to live through some very challenging times. The way we support our people and ourselves will be key in successfully tackling many of the issues facing our organisations and communities, as we navigate a further year of unpredictability, and identify the best opportunities in the year ahead.
Leadership Development
Sustainability, Workplace Transformation and EVP
2022 was a pivotal year for Leadership and Development. Across the housing industry, senior leaders were faced with an onslaught of challenges, including sustainability targets, staffing issues and the knock-on effects to tenants and employees from the cost-of-living crisis.
Our Winter Senior Leaders Network met in December, with a diverse industry pool taking part, including from Asset Management, HR, Housing Management, Development, Finance and Policy. The network is an oasis for sector leaders to come together, discuss challenges, pose creative ideas and find collective solutions to some of the biggest issues facing our industry.
Throughout the discussions, there was an acute awareness that how we support our employees and service users, both at work and beyond, will be crucial in how we meet targets and find solutions to the most common problems being faced regionally and nationally.
Recruitment
A Soft Approach? The Growing Demand For Power Skills in 2023
As market demands evolve, the sector continues to experience a number of recruitment and retainment challenges. In line with other industries, we are recognising the importance of ‘power skills’ as top proficiencies, overtaking traditionally regarded technical abilities. Recently recoined from the more contentiously labelled ‘soft skills’, power skills include communication, emotional intelligence, creativity, adaptability, and a collaborative mindset.
It is becoming easier to accumulate physical skills due to technological advances, and organisations are homing in on this with retainment strategies that include upskilling opportunities for existing employees. This is becoming preferable to looking for new people to fill existing roles for a variety of reasons, including the risk, cost, time and resources involved in hiring fresh talent, however, developing power skills, which are behavioural skills, can take more time to learn and adopt.
