What “doing our best work” means in practice

One of our key goals at Dot Dot Dot is to “do our best work”. That mantra is meaningful to us because it expresses several different important concepts at once, explains our CEO, Peter Brown.

These concepts link our identity as a social enterprise to our choices about how we go about doing the work that we do.  I’m clear that everything we do at Dot Dot Dot must contribute to our mission of providing housing that makes it easier for people to do good, and understanding the conditions that need to be in place to achieve that is vital.

Our tenth birthday has provided a welcome opportunity to reflect on all of the projects we have set up, the areas where we have worked, the people we have housed and the hundreds of thousands of hours of volunteering that our model has supported. We have been thinking about what worked well and of course about the times when we could have found better ways of doing things. 

How best work translates into great results

Dot Dot Dot’s mission hasn’t changed and the company values that we are well known for aren’t changing either. But by exploring the concept of ‘best’, all of our staff can form a view of how they can combine their skill, energy and professional commitment to deliver exceptional results.

Results here can be seen through the lens of social impact, or through creating consistent housing that’s both safe and well-managed, or when considering the financial performance of our operations. It’s also the case that the positive results of our work can be felt in several directions too, because our social enterprise business model has benefits to several groups all at once: the people we house benefit personally and financially, the communities where we have buildings benefit from great neighbours who are community-minded, charities and good causes benefit from our guardians’ volunteering, and of course our clients benefit too.

For me, the phrase “doing our best work” also fits with a more focused way of thinking about and describing the value that we create. So for our marketing and services teams, it’s about making sure we recruit and house guardians that are diligent, conscientious and who make socially responsible occupants. There are plenty of housing choices and options out there, and we choose to house people who understand our approach and who will benefit from our good-value accommodation. It’s our guardians who look after our clients’ buildings, who will vacate the buildings when we need them to, and who will contribute to communities through their volunteering, so our choices about who to house is crucially important. We know that people who are committed to supporting charitable causes are more likely to be conscientious about looking after our clients’ buildings, to be good neighbours to our clients’ existing residents, and to have the support network and resilience necessary to leave their homes with 28 days’ notice.

Finding the clients who allow us to do our best work

For our business development team, it’s about finding buildings where we can apply our efficient and effective management model to make appealing temporary homes that meet our safety standards, all while delivering projects which are financially viable for all involved. We seek clients who understand the inextricable link between our model and the quality of service we can provide as a result, and who may also be excited about our social impact creation in the communities where their buildings are based. Our model has always been distinctive, and, as we embark on our second decade of existence, we continue to demonstrate how the fact we exist to create a positive social impact actually allows us to deliver a better service to clients and communities.

If you’d like a conversation about how we look after your empty buildings and how our distinctive approach to property guardianship can help you, get in touch at partnerships@dotdotdotproperty.com.