Neighbourhood housing officer

This role provides a frontline, trusted service to our residents, as they move in and out of their homes, coping with changes in their personal circumstance or experiencing problems with their neighbours or in their communities. By assessing and understanding the context of people’s lives and identifying predictable demand the team will use systems thinking principles, learning from the experience of our residents to challenge and ultimately change where required the way the system is working , ensuring we deliver the best outcomes for our residents. The Neighbourhood Officer will have an important role to play working directly with other services, both internally and externally to meet residents need and help build the resilience of our residents and communities.

The post holder will be required to work creatively and effectively with residents, service managers and other stakeholders to develop, maintain and continually review the delivery and work practices and processes of our landlord services. The Neighbourhood officer will work with other team colleagues to help drive the direction of the work and help the Neighbourhood Manager measure how effective the work of the service is in relation to our stated purpose. It will be important to be able to spot trends and patterns in resident’s demands and identify barriers in the wider system that need to be unblocked to enable us to deliver the most effective and responsive service.

This role will not only balance frontline reactive and proactive casework to the residents living in our properties, but also influence and drive forward any necessary changes helping to co-design a landlord service that continues to adapt to meet changing needs and priorities. With support, training, sharing experience with team colleagues, and having honest conversations with residents, the Neighbourhood Officer will be empowered to work to identify and help resolve the root causes of an issue impacting on a residents life. Working as the trusted point of contact the officer will pull in support where needed, assisting the resident where possible to identify the issues and find solutions to their problems. Where possible the new approach will seek not only to resolve issues impacting on individual residents, but also more broadly to seek solutions and learn from the experience to improve the service available to the wider resident group.

The flexibility to adapt and make informed, creative and robust decisions in challenging situations to obtain the best outcomes for our residents is crucial in delivering this frontline role. The role requires the ability to build relationships and take a problem solving approach to working with our residents over what can be a very long-term relationship. The ability to challenge existing processes and barriers constructively will be an important requirement for the post holder as will be the ability to take on a continuous learning approach to the work.

The Neighbourhood Officer not only needs to build individual skills to meet the needs of our residents and communities (see below), but will need to be open to taking an approach of continuous improvement, reflecting on the teams and their own individual performance and contributing to the development of good practice. The Neighbourhood officer will need to be able to contribute to the shared learning of their team and wider service as well as managing their own workload.