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A journey we need to take

What issues should social landlords address in the standardisation of Tenant Satisfaction Surveys? David Wilton has some ideas.

As readers will be aware, social housing landlords in Wales routinely undertake tenant satisfaction surveys. This can be a valuable way of finding out what matters to tenants and putting their concerns at the heart of housing policy. All too often, however, these surveys are not delivered in a standardised and consistent manner.

Most landlords ask standard questions regarding tenants’ overall satisfaction, but many will also include specific questions of interest to themselves. Whilst there is a place for customisation, Welsh Government has recently announced its aim for landlords to undertake more regulated surveys to achieve consistent results that can be used to effectively compare housing services.

TPAS Cymru has regularly provided support to landlords looking to improve tenant response rates and engage varied demographics. To improve further, the sector needs to consider many factors:

Survey timing

If surveys drop on tenants’ doorsteps in July –the sun is shining, flowers blooming and Wales have just won Euro 2020 – responders are likely to be more positive than those responding in November, when winds are howling, the children have trailed mud across the carpet and heating your home is a challenge.

Question wording

Even a slight change in wording can massively impact results. The ‘dark arts’ used by pollsters phrasing loaded questions to manipulate answers are a subject in their own right. Surveys should be treated in a critical and informed way, subject to the partiality and biases found in any writing.

What matters most?

Different issues matter to different people. Each landlord will have tenants varying in the proportion of young families, pensioners, or economic migrants, for example. From our experience working with these demographics, perceptions of safe communities, grass-cutting and maintenance standards will vary greatly.

To incentivise or not to incentivise

There are myriad arguments both for and against incentivising surveys, and they can undoubtedly make a big difference to response rates and quality of data. If there’s no prize draw or incentive, landlords may seem uncaring. If the prize is too high, some might complete the survey as fast as they can to be in with a chance of winning. High incentives can also lead to positive answers bias, in the mistaken belief it might help the odds of winning. What accompanies the survey is also important. If it arrives with an above inflation rent increase, you’ll see more negative responses than if it comes with an invite to the summer party.

Landlord relationships

How much awareness tenants have of their landlords is another factor. Some housing associations have very well-developed communications teams, successfully pushing ‘you said, we did’ feedback. Unfortunately, some of our local authority friends with vast legacy stock struggle to gain the attention of their communications departments, who may have different communication priorities. This makes a difference in tenant awareness and therefore positivity.

Data integrity

This is an issue for surveying generally, but lower responses are often associated with the extremes – the very happy and very unhappy of engaged tenants. To obtain higher response rates and more meaningful results, landlords must get to those hard to reach demographics, and the tricky ‘middle-ground’ tenants.

The medium is the message

To receive a wide range of responses, we must offer choice and meaningful alternatives to standard paper. Landlords frequently use email and text messages linked to online surveys, promoting this in communications and pop-up events. Whatever medium a landlord uses, do consider the accessibility of the materials and messaging. If you offer alternative formats, make them easy to use and swift to get hold of.

Survey experience

Think about the last time you struggled with a poorly designed website. Fiddly forms with inaccessible fonts, pages that take too long to load, and badly written questions – none of this will put the responder in a good mood. Equally, the length of survey is vital. Long surveys require stamina and favour people with more spare time. Adding lengthy questions personal to the landlord means that goodwill gets stretched and positivity declines as respondents progress through the survey.

As a final comment, the Welsh Government is committed to making these results transparent on a dedicated website by April 2021. For this to work, we need to see much more commitment and time, to ensure the findings are more useable than previous data transparency projects.

To be of value to tenants, especially in scrutiny and accountability sessions, we all need to take a deeper look at the surveys – to really understand the views of different demographics, analysed through simple, consolidated, side-by-side comparisons.

The standardisation of satisfaction surveys is a very welcome development. As this subject gather pace, TPAS Cymru will continue to offer opportunities for members to discuss, debate, and share ideas on best practice.

David Wilton is chief executive of TPAS Cymru


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