Our people remain at the heart of everything we do

We own and manage c.7000 homes in the East of England, working closely with other agencies and stakeholders, within the communities we serve.

Before the pandemic, our teams split their working day between our office here in Bury St Edmunds and in the homes and communities of their residents. 

However, in March 2020, like everyone else, our office closed in line with government guidance.  Most of our people were quickly and seamlessly able to move to working from home and for our people working out in the community, strict protocols were put in place to protect them. Like everyone else in the country, we were in unknown territory. Our main priority was the safety and well-being of our people – residents as well as our teams. Our teams took everything in their stride and continued to provide a great level of customer service to our tenants and stakeholders, whilst embracing new ways of working and keeping each other’s spirts up.

Coming out of lockdown we found that the flexibility of working from home but being able to come into the office to work on projects or meet with other colleagues, proved not only popular with our people but meant we could be flexible to enhance productivity. Ultimately this meant we could provide better services to our customers whilst helping our people find a great work life balance. 

We worked with our people to create a model that would work best for them, we wanted to shift the focus from focusing on hours spent in the office to outputs, i.e what we deliver and achieve not how long anyone is sitting at a desk, this was all underpinned by our values of: respecting, engaging and fair.

We concluded this consultation exercise over the summer and have recently launched all new Contracts of Employments that support flexible and hybrid working. It’s important to emphasise that the needs of our customers, and therefore the needs of the business will always come first, but it helps us to ensure that we provide a healthy work life balance.

In practice this means that people have greater freedoms to balance working from home or the office and managing their weekly hours throughout the course of the week. 

This hybrid approach to work allows our people to balance work between other commitments such as picking children up from school, attending appointments and spending time with their family. 

Our office has also been modernised to reflect these changes. Hot desks and collaborative working spaces have replaced individual desks, to suit all different working needs and styles. 

Over the next 5 years, we have set ourselves ambitious objectives. By transforming our services, systems and processes it will enable us to grow our great team and offer further opportunities across all areas of the organisation, ultimately delivering great services to residents.   

We are hosting a recruitment event in the Arc Shopping Centre on Friday 5 and Saturday 6 November between 10 am – 4 pm. Whether you are looking for an exciting new challenge or want to know a bit more about what it’s like to work at Havebury, we would love for you to come and chat to us.