Housing firm gets gold in Investors in People

The assessment focuses on nine key areas, and to achieve the accreditation, organisations are assessed on each of these to determine which standard they are performing against in terms of how they invest in their staff.

This is the second time Ongo has achieved Gold, which is a great achievement due to the criteria changing in the assessment, making it more difficult to get the Gold standard.

The assessment consists of an initial meeting with IIP assessors, the Ongo HR Team and Senior Management. Plus there was also an online survey which all staff had the opportunity to complete and there were focus groups with staff picked at random by the assessors. These were all to identify how Ongo invests in its staff, areas that Ongo is a strong performer and also ways in which the organisation can improve further.

Mo Mathieson, Organisational Development Manager, said: “We’re all so pleased that Ongo achieved Gold, it’s something that all the staff here should be extremely proud of. As the criteria’s changed so much since we were assessed last time making it much harder to achieve Gold it shows how far we’ve come in the last 3 years.

“The assessor was very complementary of the work we do to invest in our staff, including our management training programmes, how well embedded our values are and how the staff truly live them, and how polite and friendly all the staff were.

“Doing the Investors in People assessment was a brilliant opportunity to look at what we’ve done well as an organisation for our staff, and how we can improve further to become an even better place to work.”