I recently had a look at a new protocol on using social media in the workplace. It was designed to help staff navigate the minefield of posting to organisational profiles on social media platforms AND to remind them of standards of behaviour expected with their own personal pages.
I fully understood the need for reminders about personal usage of social media – I’m sure we can all think of instances where someone has said something about their day at work in private conversations with them, but when that comment is a post that could potentially be seen by clients there is a need to think about whether it is appropriate to say it or not. Personally, I’m firmly in the ‘If you wouldn’t say in a crowded cafe, don’t say it online’ camp.
However, another point in the protocol document, and the reason for this blog post, was a ban on the use of social media during an application process. Basically, we were NOT to check someone’s online activities and then use anything found there as part of the application process. However, using social media to advertise a vacancy was allowed as long as it was only one of the methods being used.
Then I saw a tweet from Paul Taylor about this article on Business Insider about how a person’s online presence is worth more than their CV and it basically started a discussion with John Popham, Shirley Ayres, Georgette Wright all picking up on it and finally Tom Sprints concluding the issue would be a good subject for a future #Lgovsm topic.
So then we got here… I decided to write a blog firstly to clarify the issue and secondly to (hopefully) gather comments and more information on the matter. While researching the topic I came across a number of sites that offered advice on attracting candidates by using Social Media including here and here and a useful ‘How to’ by Graham Snowdon of the Guardian here but it wasn’t until I hit the ACAS website that I found some of the potential pitfalls really explained.
“Recruiters need to be careful to respect an applicant’s privacy“. That’s a stark warning from their page on the subject. It’s not wrong but you need to aware of what information you’re using. The usage of ethnicity, religion, age, marital status and sexual orientation – often publicly available on social media profiles – is protected under the Equality Act.
ACAS goes on to make the point that there is a danger of discriminating against those who either don’t have a social media platform, or don’t use the internet at all. All fair points, but by quarter 2 of 2012 the ONS statistical bulletin (here) says only 16% of adults in the UK had never used the net (down 10% on the previous year) and most of those were in the 55-75+ age bands (42% of the total who never used the web were 75+ and even that was down on the previous year!)
So dear reader, if you’ve got this far it’s your turn. Comment as much as you like – both for and against the use of social media in the recruitment process. If you can, please feel free to link to other sources of information and/or policies on the subject.
The floor as they say, is yours…
Here in the Eastern Region the CIH’s local Board has been running a series of Lunch & Learn events for a number of years now. Usually 3 sets of 3 sessions a year focussing on subjects as wide ranging as Updates to Housing Law and Housing an Ageing Population. Aimed mainly at front line staff who are delivering a service the events have proved popular time after time. 
The latest L&L events are being led by myself on the subject of Social Media in Housing, a topic close to my heart. Primarily about Twitter, but we have a quick look at Facebook and LinkedIn as well.
The first session was at the Athenaeum in Bury St Edmunds, and the questions afterwards, as usual were varied and interesting prompting short debates on “How to get residents to engage with your Facebook page” and “How to sift through the ‘noise’ of a Twitter timeline to get the best out of it”.
The first of those questions came from Mel, from Colchester Borough Homes who wanted some ideas about driving residents to their Facebook page. Sarah, from Broadland Housing Group responded with an idea that they have been doing: when photos of people were taken at events they are told that they can get copies from Broadland’s Facebook page, this pushed the number of ’Likes’ up almost every time.
For keeping people interested it was decided that the best way was to post regularly, and make it interesting. Stonewall‘s Twitter quiz was mentioned as one way to keep people tuning in. Every Friday afternoon at 4pm they post a question with inexpensive prizes, but it does have the effect of making people watch out for posts from them on Fridays. It was pointed out that the timing would have to be considered as it was felt to be important that people were around to monitor any answering posts, but the principle was thought to be sound and well worth a try.
The second question was a bit of a poser and was thanks to Mike from Circle Housing Group for raising it – how DO you filter the tweets you want to read from the rest? Lists was the obvious answer but it wasn’t the best, there surely had to be another way? Twitter has its own filter settings (you can find out how to use them here) but I didn’t know any alternative (not being very good at filtering at all – just don’t even mention my email inbox!).
However a quick check with the trusted Google search engine came up with a couple of sites with possible answers: Mashable and MediaBistro – feel free to post any others you may know in the comments below please… I’ll try anything once!
All in all it was a good session I thought and the feedback forms were all either Good or Very Good so I must have done something right! I’ll post an update to this blog if the next two sessions on the 11th and 14th March come up with different questions.
To find out more about the Eastern Regions Lunch & Learn Sessions or to book your place on the upcoming Social Media sessions check out the flyers for either Essex (Harlow) or Cambridge (Sth Cambs Council Offices at Cambourne) or contact our wonderful regional support officer – Celeste Deakin at CIH, Coventry on 02476 851786 or Celeste.Deakin@cih.org
What do older people want from life when they’re ‘older’?
This was the question that Joan Bakewell OBE set out to answer for us when she spoke at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s Eastern Region Conference this week.
Joan was the final speaker of the 3 day conference that had seen topics from ASB to Welfare Reform considered and discussed by over 300 housing professionals from the region and beyond.
It was clear from her research that one of the most important things for people when they reached ‘that certain age’ was a place of their own over which they could have total control to put up pictures and to have ‘stuff’ that retained memories of loved ones, or earlier days all over their place. Too often, she said, are older people being asked to enter retirement homes or schemes that limit the pictures one can have on the walls, or worse limit the memories of older people just to save on space.
This was one of the main reasons that she felt older people hate to move – not for the trouble; indeed many landlords will provide a large amount of help to alleviate the trouble. They’ll pack for you, load the vans and even unpack for you if you want. But what they won’t do usually is give you enough space for all your stuff!
Gardens are important too she thinks – whether their own gardens or communal – spaces that are facing the right way, yet sheltered to enable a quiet afternoon spent sitting in the sun reading a book or just thinking. They give the older person a place to relax and just be without them having to worry they’re in someone’s way.
Another, and obvious benefit of gardens is that older people tend to like having growing things around them – trees, flowers, even vegetables – these are all affirmations of life, and older people need them as they get towards the end of their own lives as they give a sense of continuity that older people feel they need. Having their own space to grow something is even better and window boxes are a favourite (they don’t need to bend down too much!)
Joan was very clear on the need for older people to have access to local amenities, shops, post office, Doctors and library all hit the top of the list of what’s needed close by – within walking distance preferably – but not too close. Older people recognise the need to be active and so a daily walk to collect their paper, a weekly trip to the library to change their book or CD or indeed DVD these days are all ways of them keeping active, and involved in the local community.
For Joan, one of the more promising developments of recent years has been recognition of most of the above lines of reasoning; schemes are becoming more user friendly while retaining the safety and security that older people also need. Amenities are part of the project from the start and flats, apartments and houses are built with simple adaptations already in place and future possible needs designed in – wider doorways, plugs halfway up a wall and so on. Joan has visited one such scheme at Oscott Village and is impressed. Facilities in the retirement village include medical, shopping, community centres and parks, all within easy reach of the 250 homes there.
However, she is also very clear that what we don’t want to do is create older people ghettos. Older people need to be around younger people too, and while building a scheme next to a junior school isn’t a good idea getting older people involved in their community is. Intergenerational events such as ‘Adopt a Granny’ or even just ‘coffee & squash mornings’ with local schools are always well attended – the old love the young and “the relationship between the very old and the very young is incredibly enriching and fruitful”, she says.
Mixed communities are important – but they need to be a choice that older people make for themselves, some will relish the idea, others won’t and it’s important that new schemes are built that reflect the options available.
Joan’s final subject was about isolation. Older people today are becoming more and more isolated because life seems to move so much faster than it did before. We’re busier, with more going on to distract us, and we live further apart than we used to, “We live in an aggressively active society now but if you’ve little money, or have mobility problems it’s easy to slip into isolation”.
The signs are easy to spot: people will stop looking after themselves, not washing each day like they used to; letting the house get dusty and dirty; or ‘closing’ parts of the house down – living in just one or two rooms on the ground floor. These signs are obvious when you’re looking for them and Joan wants us all to be on the watch for them because it’s easy to make a huge difference to someone’s life!
Photos of Joan Bakewell by Philip Mynott Photographer http//:www.philmynottphoto.co.uk
One of the sessions I attended at the Chartered Institute of Housing Conference in Manchester last week was the ‘Sacred Cow’ session on the continuance of ALMOs – obviously I had a slight bias as the Chair of an ALMO going through a Housing Services Review but was interested in what others might have say on the subject.
There were quite a few other ALMOs represented but there were attendees who were obviously from the ‘other side of the fence’, Council Officers, Lead members or representatives from other organisations – ARCH being the most vocal on the day.
I have to say right from the start that I felt the question was loaded in any case – I don’t think that ALMOs do have a right to exist in any circumstances, but where this is correct for the local authority, the ALMO and most importantly the tenants it is right that ALMOs should be enabled to continue.
In general the session was in favour of ALMOs continuing. Points were made about value for money – and it’s absolutely right that an ALMO, like any other organisation should review the services it offers and carries out research into cost/benefit and value for money on a regular basis. It also became clear that ALMOs need to diversify and create an income stream for themselves – either by offering other services to their Council or functions they already carry out to other organisations, but interestingly attendees didn’t think that ALMOs should be trying to break into the Private Rented Sector. I think that’s a mistake, it’s an area that ALMOs could really make a difference but as I said before it’s very much a local decision.
In a session with an emotive title like the one I above I did expect there to be one or two people who were going to take a counter view to that of most ALMOs, but the vehemence of the two guys from ARCH (Association of Retained Council Housing) really surprised me. I’ve spoken to residents of both guy’s local authorities and they speak really well of their respective housing departments (no, I won’t name them). Clearly in those areas the views of residents really do matter – they are involved and informed and with the authority have quite a say on driving performance.
That is great, but it’s far from the case in every local authority and one thing ALMOs get very good at very quickly is involving tenants at every level of their organisations.
A point made early in the session was that the tenants served by ALMOs have all decided, one way or another, to remain council tenants and as such you’d expect that ARCH and the ALMO movement would have a lot in common – sadly, if the two guys there were representative of the ARCH membership that’s not the case.
This could be a problem in the future – Council housing could very easily become a thing of the past if the ideas of the conservative-leaning thinktanks are taken to the logical conclusion. If, (when) that happens we will all need to be working together and division now will only serve the ‘other side’.
I look forward to the day that ARCH and ALMOs can stand on the same platform saying the same things about involving tenants for better services, and most of all keeping and increasing the supply of council owned housing up and down the land!
ALMOs in general are good for the tenants they serve and good for their host council too, but like everything else they must evolve and justify the ‘extra’ expense of having one. I don’t think that many will have a problem justifying that – as long as the question is asked fairly and transparently. Unfortunately, this has not always been the case of late and some really good ALMOs have been taken back in-house in the name of saving money without any real consultation with the tenants who were receiving the service from them.
Long may they continue!
Note: For those who don’t know what an ALMO is – They’re an Arms Length Management Organisation wholly owned by a local authority to deliver a particular service, in this case housing management, to the council’s tenants. While the concept has been around quite a while, the oldest housing ALMOs are only about 10 years old.
The last labour Government encouraged them as an alternative to stock transfer to enable investment (in the form of Govt loans) in the stock – some of which had become badly maintained due to housing finance subsidy shortfalls. Between 2002 and 2009 over £4.6billion of improvements had been delivered to more than 250,000 homes in England with 58 Audit Commission inspections resulting in 21 organisations gaining 3 stars and 37, 2 stars under the previous regulatory regime.
For more information on the work ALMOs do check out the National Federation of ALMOs website
With (depending on your point of view) neat or cruel irony the number of part-time employees hit a record high within hours of them being identified as a major target for a second round of welfare reform.
Official figures published on Wednesday morning confirmed that unemployment fell by 45,000 to 2.63 million people and the number of people in work rose by 105,000.
Grant Shapps has predictably had a go but it’s hard to see the housebuilding figures out today as anything other than awful.
The housing minister tweeted that housing starts in 2011 were up 29 per cent on 2009. Curiously, though, he did not mention the figures that had just been published for the first quarter of 2012.
Read the rest of this post on my blog for Inside Housing.
Glancing down my feed on twitter earlier today I saw someone pose a question about what criteria people used when deciding to unfollow someone on there.
This got me thinking – as these things do and I thought I would set out my reasons for hitting the unfollow button. I should say that these are MY reasons and I would not encourage anyone to use my methods but instead to develop your own from what you consider important.
The first thing I need to say is that I’m really disorganised! Seriously. I hardly ever go through my list but I do use Twentyfeet to monitor who stops following me and depending on how much ‘value’ I place on their posts I will often unfollow someone as a result.
Another ‘useful’ service I use is Twit Cleaner which after a few minutes (depending on how many followers YOU have) will give you a report based on what they tweet about – for instance if someone posts only links to a particular site TC will list it ‘Dodgy Behaviour’ then it’ll up to you if you want to unfollow them or not. Just click on their avatar in TC and it will unfollow them a bit later on to save Twitter getting bogged down with unfollow requests.
So, apart from these helpful apps how else do I decide to do the deed?
Firstly, I will often unfollow someone if my feed seems to be taken up by them – you all know the type, 30 odd tweets per day and most of them either in the morning or the afternoon. Now we’ve all had a few days in our time on Twitter when we’ve posted a lot – maybe we’re ‘reporting’ from an event or seminar, or possibly ‘live-tweeting’ the action during a day but when it happens every day, or least most days I do sometimes think “I don’t really need to read quite so much from this person, after all I already follow their blog and I can catch up with them there.”
I think it’s perfectly fine to stop following someone in those circumstances.
I don’t subscribe to the belief that ALL a person’s posts should be about their field of work or whatever but there is a balance that needs to be struck. Many of the Housing types I follow seem to tweet about football on Saturdays - now I don’t like football but I won’t stop following a person just because of a tweets about it – BUT I usually follow someone for a particular reason, maybe they’re a housing professional and I want to hear what they have to say about policy announcements from Govt or they’re a social media geek and I’ll want to be reading about latest trends in SM or how to do it better…if they stray too far from that ‘purpose’ too often then I may well consider unfollowing them – but again, it will depend on the ‘quality’ of the tweets that are ‘on-topic’ (as far as I’m concerned anyway).
At the end of the day it will boil down to that in all such decisions really – do the tweets that I want to read come often enough with enough ‘quality’ that I will put up with the football, the running (or cycling), and the family news. More often that not I don’t unfollow people – I like to read that they’re pleased #MUFC won a match (whoever they are??), or that they’ve completed the London Marathon (well done to everyone that did it by the way!) because I’m basically a social person and this is SOCIAL media after all.
Does all that help? Probably not, but it is personal and unfollowing someone is about as personal as it gets on Twitter. I’m not one of these people who insists on you following me just because I’ve followed you, or vice-versa. I follow you because I’m interested in what you have to say, I hope you’re following me for the same reasons.
