Always be curious

I meet Baljinder Kang at the Birmingham-headquartered offices of Midland Heart, a not-for-profit housing association which owns and manages more than 32,000 properties across the Midlands. Kang’s current role is executive director of corporate resources at the association. She has a strong HR background, beginning her 25-year-long career as a training administrator. After working in the private sector, she had HR roles at the NHS and the charity Sense before joining Midland Heart in 2014 as director of HR learning.

Since then, she has transformed the housing association’s HR function and is now responsible for the corporate resources agenda, which includes health and safety, facilities management, projects, corporate affairs and technology. She sits on the executive team of four, which she tells me, never has a dull day, consisting of anything from facilities to corporate affairs to HR, and then back again.

Though she doesn’t wear her "HR hat" in board meetings, the mother-of-two champions diversity, having spearheaded the first report on the ethnicity pay gap to “make Midland Heart a place where everyone can truly succeed regardless of background or circumstance." She tells Reward Strategy about how being "nosy" led her into a career in Human Resources, her youthful dream of becoming a sports journalist, how to entice the over 50s back into the labour market, and her favourite piece of advice.

VB: How did you get into HR?

BK: I didn’t aspire to be in HR, my ambition was actually to be a sports journalist, but my parents are immigrants into this country and had a traditional mindset and views which determined that it wasn’t for a young woman. I did a sensible degree in business studies and stumbled into HR. I was a training administrator and was asked if I would like to run inductions and I got nosy. I was intrigued by how we brought people into the firm, kept hold of them and how they developed and grew.

VB: What did you love about your role in HR?

BK: It’s been a long time since I’ve done pure HR work. My portfolio is much broader now than HR but what I love about it is that I think I’ve got quite an analytical brain and when someone came along to see me when I was a HR business partner or a HR manager, it would be to offload these issues they had, whether it was from a manager perspective or an employee perspective, and when you start analysing and breaking down those issues, you realise there is an awful lot there. I loved helping people to come out of the quagmire of these problems and finding there are a lot solutions.

VB: In your current role as executive director of corporate resources at Midland Heart, what does your day to day involve?

BK: Anything and everything. It’s never typical. This morning, I dealt with a whole host of IT related things, to looking at procuring new sites as one of our three core offices because I’m also responsible for facilities management. We’ve got some comms and media type inquiries. It really can go from anything from IT to facilities to corporate affairs to HR and then back again. Sometimes it has nothing to do with any of those things.

VB: You have 25 years’ experience in HR and have mentored colleagues in the past. What is the best piece of advice you could pass on to people?

BK: Always be curious. Always ask because people do a lot of things for a lot of different reasons. Usually, because it’s always been done in a certain way and I’ll always say, don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo.

VB: In the current climate, what would you say staff most want from their work and from their work life?

BK: People want to be engaged, motivated, and fulfilled. Most people want to feel like there’s a sense of purpose to the work that they’re doing. They need to understand, if I’m a cog in this massive wheel, where does my bit of the cog fit into this wheel? If people can understand that sense of purpose and what their contribution is, most people genuinely get engagement, motivation and a sense of fulfilment from that. People want to feel listened to, especially in the current climate where if we’re honest, there isn’t a lot of good news in the world now.

VB: Are Midland Heart experiencing any of any staff shortages?

BK: I don’t think we’re any different to any other employer, especially coming out of the pandemic. Attracting good quality people and then being able to hang on to them has been as much of a challenge for us as innovation. I think there’s certain sectors; hospitality, retail, where the problem is more acute. Andy Street (West Midlands Mayor) has done a brilliant job in attracting lots of big employers into Birmingham city centre, which can only be good for the region and its economy. The downside of that is you still have the same pool of people that you’re trying to fish from in terms of your labour market, but the number of fishing rods in that pool has increased and some of them are massive fishing rods in comparison to us.

VB: What benefits are important to attract and retain staff?

BK: There isn’t going to be a one size fits all. The important thing is that you have a range of benefits that appeal to all the different generations that are in the workforce at the moment. What’s important to 16–18-year-olds coming into the labour market now would likely be very different to my age group. For us, we have things like smart working, we don’t expect anybody to be in an office five days a week, but equally, we’re not the type of organisation where we have everybody working from home. Everybody’s got to have a work location which can be determined by the job that you’ve got. In the case of Midland Heart, that might be in an office, it might be at home or in a customer’s home or on a development site. We have a range of benefits that we offer to people in terms of discounts through our subsidised benefits platform where colleagues can make their money go further. Here, they can access a whole range of things like high street discounts, restaurant vouchers, money off their everyday shopping and they can build up products on the platform to contribute to bigger items. We also have recognition schemes.

VB: What do you think about companies giving staff a once-off cost-of-living payment?

BK: There’s lots of organisations which have given staff once-off payments, or a short-term increase in salaries, but the cost-of-living crisis isn’t confined to a couple of months. It’s not going away anytime soon. Our job is to make sure that we give people benefits that are going to benefit them in the longer term.

VB: How do you educate staff about how to navigate through the cost-of-living crisis?

BK: We have financial education workshops, so colleagues can really understand how they can manage their money effectively and they don’t get to the point where they’ve hit a crisis financially.

VB: What are your plans in terms of benefits within your role in the next year?

BK: We’ve got a whole host of benefits we are rolling out to our staff including a health cash plan for staff. We’re introducing additional annual leave so staff have the option to buy extra time off. We’ve also heard feedback from staff that they want us to do more around charitable giving so we’re giving people an opportunity to round up or round down their salaries with a difference going to charity.

VB: How do you get over-50s back into the labour market?

BK: The challenge is to give over-50s a reason to want to come to work for you in a way that you’ve probably never had to do before. I suppose this is a sector where Midland Heart may be in a more fortunate position. What is more important than giving people and their families a home? We can try to attract people who want to do good to reconsider re-entering the workforce to give a sense of purpose. For the over-50s, if it isn’t the financial attraction, we want to appeal to those who want to give something back to society and contribute.

VB: How do you make your team happy?

BK: Recognition is very important. We hold long-serving awards. That’s an important way for us to recognise the contribution of our colleagues. Every team has away days where they can do a mix of social fun stuff. We had a whole bunch of events from Black History Month culminating in a mini carnival where we had Caribbean food. We also have our Star Awards, focusing on those who have gone above and beyond. Every winter we have a winter wellbeing campaign and we send a little parcel to people’s homes.

VB: How do you look after employees’ mental health?

BK: It’s crucial to make sure you signpost people to lots of sources of information. On our benefits platform, we’ve got a whole section on wellbeing, health, and expert advice from various different providers about how employees can take care of themselves. We have things like Mental Health First Aiders to spot the early signs that somebody might be struggling with their mental health.

VB: How do companies tackle mental health issues related to the cost-of-living crisis?

BK: The research tells us there’s a spiral that usually starts off with financial challenges which triggers a mental health response. We are educating our workforce in terms of how to manage their finances, so they don’t end up in a crisis. We try to equip staff with the skills to handle that.

VB: What does Midland Heart do to promote diversity in the workplace?

BK: We have a mandatory eLearning module on equality and diversity that all staff take which must be repeated every four years. We then have a diversity conversation that people join, either annually or once every two years, which is about getting people in a room and starting a conversation about issues connecting around equality, diversity, and inclusion. And quite often when you have a mixed group, people will start talking about their experiences and other people will stop to think. We also have stereotypes training which features our own colleagues talking about microaggressions and their own experiences. We were also one of the few employers in our sector to publish, alongside our gender pay gap, we published our first report on our ethnicity pay gap.

VB: Do you think that people entering the workforce post-lockdown are missing out?

BK: I’ve got a 24-year-old and a 22-year-old. My 24-year-old finished his degree in the second lockdown and started his graduate job, again in lockdown, so he didn’t see any of his team until he’d been working with them for two years. There’s a whole host of learning that he’s missed out on at the start of his career, going into an office and being present, you soak up so much and so much from the people around you. Now that generation haven’t had the opportunity to learn the rules.

VB: Post-Covid, is the true value of HR now being seen?

BK: Yes but it shouldn’t have taken the pandemic to do that. I think most organisations woke up to the fact that it’s not so easy to get people in and if we don’t get people in we’re not going to be able to run this business and deliver our products and services. There’s been much more of a focus on hanging on to the people that you’ve got and attracting the best people that you can get. The notion that there will always be a supply of labour has been rocked in a way that certainly in my working life has not happened before.