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, 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

Objectives that this role will deliver:

To understand the ongoing presenting and contextual needs of our residents and our properties and neighbourhoods;

To develop skills and knowledge in key areas to meet the needs of residents;

To offer as part of a collaborative neighbourhood team one clear trusted point of contact to resolve resident needs;

To support residents to solve problems at their root cause to build future resilience for individual residents and   our communities;

To deal with things as early as we can, and as much as we can, pulling in support when needed to resolve resident issues in partnership with other officers, services and organisations;

To learn about the work and develop the service in line with systems thinking principles to meet the changing needs of our customers;

To work closely with and develop partnerships with other agencies, teams and colleagues to deliver a service consistent with the changing needs of our customers;

To act as a lead contact for Tenant and Resident Association in the neighbourhood;

To promote and engage in restorative principles and participatory practice in working with our residents and partners.

Relationships:

To work closely with officers within the neighbourhood team, senior officers and elected members to meet customer demands effectively;

To work closely with colleagues in other services to resolve problems, and to pull in colleagues and partners where the skills or knowledge are not available in the neighbourhood;

To identify patterns in barriers and obstacles to the work and address these collaboratively with peers and senior colleagues;

To build close working partnerships in the neighbourhood area and other teams to best deliver for Camden residents  in our properties, for example NHS, Police, Domestic Violence and Money Advice agencies and professionals;

Ability to work collaboratively across Directorates, teams and external partners to deliver our purpose and principles;

Work Environment:

Working proactively in our neighbourhoods to get a good understanding of residents and our properties as well as working closely with other agencies.

·        Working in 5PS and other Camden offices and homeworking when not out in neighbourhood;

·        Attendance at external meetings, sometimes outside normal working hours, may be required, such as TRA meetings and community events.

Technical Knowledge and Experience:

·        Ability to listen and understand resident demands, Ability to build capabilities and encourage tenants to reach their own solutions;

·        Ability to use initiative to meet resident demands creatively and innovatively to explore possibilities for improvement and more effective delivery;

·        Ability to understand patterns of resident demands and provide a flexible approach according to individual needs;

·        Ability to develop skills, knowledge and expertise to meet resident demands in the neighbourhood, for example:

o   Money, Debt and budgeting;

o   Resolving disputes;

o   Tenancy law;

o   Housing Options.

o   Employment and skills;

o   Health and support;