Trusting in you at Bromford

Colleague engagement: two words that strike fear into the breast of many a manager, and indeed their employees. But for us, it is very simple. We believe that to be happy at work we must help our employees to feel comfortable enough to be themselves in the workplace.

We encourage our colleagues to bring their personalities to work, not foster a persona that bears little relation to their life and relationships outside the job. To stifle someone's personality at work is positively Dickensian; why, as a business, include personality description in a job specification and then fail to make use of it? You wouldn't buy an expensive computer system and then leave it standing dormant.

Our internal social media platform, Yammer, has no rules and actively encourages our people to say what they think about their work. It provides an informal link for everyone who wants to join in, including the most senior colleagues in the organisation.

We encourage customer service staff to be themselves in their relationship with tenants. We ask them to give honest, no-nonsense advice, make the most of every conversation, recognise everyone's differences and show enthusiasm and individualism.

Equally, we don't prevent the use of social media at work but actively encourage it. If you use it at home, we trust you to use it here – just make sure you think before you tweet. We encourage a culture where it's OK to break the rules when it's the right thing to do. We don't want to find our people hiding behind policy and procedure.

Who we are, our experiences, our ideas and our interests are all part of what makes us individuals and the employees we become. We identify this in people right from the start of the recruitment process, where we'll just as likely gain an insight into the real abilities and motivations of a candidate by playing a board game with them as discussing their CV.

Once in post, we encourage colleagues to take ownership of their role and help to steer the future of the organisation. We motivate everyone to be an active, not passive, member of the Bromford community. Nothing is more motivating to colleagues than to know their ideas matter and there is a mechanism to make sure those ideas are heard throughout the organisation.

Our advice to others is: be a 3D business. Engage your people in what you do, how you do it and why you do it. Learn from other people and unashamedly incorporate the best of those ideas into your business. Most of all, ban the words "staff" and "department". Nobody spends lives their life in a department and shares lunch with staff. We are colleagues, and we work in teams.