Our Cultural Journey
Our people and culture our are the most important elements of making Tai Calon a successful community housing association.
Transforming Through Culture
Our culture is changing and evolving as Tai Calon has done so in recent years. Following the pandemic, the world of work experienced exponential changes in attitudes, behaviours, engagement and motivation, and we can now see how this is shaping for the future generations.
A workplace for many people is a place that is inclusive, safe, challenging, engaging and motivational. To be in a job that you enjoy is so important when our working time takes up so much of our lives.
At Tai Calon we have begun to nurture a culture that is based on our values of CALON and trust. Our work to date has been to engage with our Board, our Leadership, our operational managers and our colleagues to identify the why of cultural change but also the how and the what.
We’ve done this over a period of three years, with much of the change happening organically. We took time to understand the culture as it was, then asked the right questions as to what it needed to be. We spent time with individuals, teams and departments, finding out what we needed to do in order to inspire the right culture. From that, we have designed workshops and programmes to help put in place learning and training to support the changes needed, and have continued to invite conversations around our culture through various opportunities and events.
At Tai Calon we believe that our people are truly a group of caring humans who work to support some of the most vulnerable people in our community. That belief, among other things, means living our CALON values every day, striving to be inclusive, and building a vibrant workplace that believes culture comes first.
Elle Elliot, Head of People & Culture
In three years we have developed a people driven culture, aligned to our values and supported by our ways of working now. Through this, we have achieved accreditation as a Great Place to Work 2023/24, with impressive results.
We continue to develop the culture we want as a Housing Association in the South Wales Valleys; we have a focus on developing trust, building our communications, enabling our teams to be high performing, encouraging change and learning. These are exciting times to be at Tai Calon.
Strengthening Culture at Tai Calon through CALON
Our culture will change and evolve as Tai Calon changes and evolves.
When we encourage Creativity, we can think differently, and this helps us to make improvements and take risks. We can enable collaboration, teamwork, and consideration through Authenticity, and try new things, update our skills and grow professionally and personally through Learning. We take Ownership and accountability for our actions and how we work together, and we can count on each other through challenging times, because we are Not on our own. These values help create the culture where Tai Calon can flourish and evolve as a caring and people-focused force within our community.
Measuring success, change and impact.
How will we know when we have made a difference?
We have a number of ways to measure, and these include:
- An annual ‘Organisation Culture Assessment Indicator’ (OCAI), taken at Board and Leadership level.
- Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) way of identifying, mapping and achieving what we plan to do.
- Continuous employee engagement methods, such as surveys, polls, workshops, focus groups and general feedback.
- Improved internal communications and sense checking the ‘feel’ of the organisation through interaction and comment.
- People info and stats; absence, turnover, workplace resolutions
- Learning outcomes – uptake, knowledge improvement, knowledge sharing, evaluations and skill transitions.