Six Town Housing

Established in 2005, Six Town Housing is an arms length management organisation (ALMO), which manages the housing stock owned by Bury Council.

The company provides a range of services — from helping with buying, selling or renting homes, to advising on energy efficiency – for around 8000 homes in Bury to improve the quality of living for residents.

Six Town Housing prides itself on being a sustainable employer and embracing the digital era.

Until now, Six Town’s HR department had struggled with the abundance of paper-based documents – burdening its goal of being sustainable – and multitudes of Excel spreadsheets to manage data and complete daily tasks.

This meant that information was spread across physical and digital folders, with no way to manage it efficiently. This also made it difficult to analyse the data for reporting purposes – a must for modern HR teams.

Masses of HR administration was a drain on employee time, which could have been spent on more strategic and gratifying work. Meanwhile, the printing and filing documents just didn’t line up with the company’s values.

Six Town Housing wanted to reduce the administrative burden on the HR department and reduce printing throughout the organisation. It was important it had everything stored in one easy system for people to be able to access what they needed to fulfill their roles.

Discovering Natural HR in 2020 changed the game for Rachel Shorrock, Sixtown’s business manager for people and culture and her HR team. This was also a priority with the new ways of working arising due to the global pandemic, which meant that the HR team was now working from home and needed employee information to be centralised.

From looking at other players in the market, she concluded that Natural HR was the most engaging system and simple to use – both important factors in the selection process.

The bespoke nature of the technology also made it stand out from the crowd, as the team was keen to make suggestions to tailor it for their specific needs — something which Natural HR prides itself on.

As a result of moving all HR workflows onto the platform, the amount of time spent on admin has been reduced significantly and the team no longer has to rely on manual calculations.

Six Town Housing’s documents are now well controlled, and there is no need to print out physical copies.

Natural HR’s pulse survey feature has allowed Rachel and her team to act on issues in a timely manner and the ticket system speeds up the query process, by eliminating the need for individual emails.

Rachel commends the Natural HR support team for mitigating any issues quickly. She goes on to praise the team at Natural saying “they have a drive to make the platform even better. They are eager to assist.”

Six Town Housing is utilising the workflow functions on Natural HR to ensure audit trails are diligent and there is less of a reliance on emails and having to save these threads. Workflows have again reduced the admin-heavy side of HR processes, such as reporting accidents, applying for flexible working and notifying policy changes to all employees.

Six Town Housing has experienced the real benefits Natural HR’s all-in-one system brings to the HR department. They will continue to work closely in the future to ensure all of their needs continue to be fulfilled.

To find out more about Six Town Housing, please visit www.sixtownhousing.org