Roland Karthaus, Managing Consultant at Inner Circle, considers the importance of relationship building and learning in Housing Services and speculates about what might come next in a future of automation and AI.

Reflective and Relational practice: what and why?

Relational practice is how relationships between professionals and the users of their services are built. Social housing landlords provide a wide range of services to their residents and doing so in a relational way means being sensitive to individual, human needs based in empathy and trust. This is especially important in housing because people’s homes affect their experience and life chances in hugely significant ways. Recent high-profile cases including Grenfell and the tragic case of Awaab Ishak who died from damp and mould in a poorly maintained home have highlighted technical failures, but their root causes were linked to a lack of empathy and human connection in the services provided by their landlords.

Reflection is the conscious act of stepping back from daily work to learn from and improve practices and is increasingly recognised as essential to building relational cultures within organisations and amongst professional cohorts.

In an extended period of socioeconomic pressure and uncertainty, where the state appears constrained and housing need continues to outstrip provision, these practices matter more than ever. For some, they come naturally as “just what professional people do”. For many others, however, the relentless pressure to do more with less makes relational working feel harder than ever.

Human beings are relational by nature: community and society arise from our need to form relationships with one another. The separation of work from other parts of life, combined with financial pressure to reduce the cost of public services, has created an artificial barrier between human relationships and professional practice. Becoming more relational at work means carefully breaking down this barrier while still allowing people to switch off outside work. Achieving this in services under pressure is challenging and needs organisational support, so valuing it within the housing system is critical.

Relational value in the housing system

Housing is a complex system. Good housing services are critical both to immediate outcomes for residents and to wider social outcomes. As recent experience has shown, a policy focus on housing numbers does not only drive down quality; it fails to deliver quantity too. That is because the product of the housing system is not brick boxes, but homes: spaces that meet people’s fundamental, qualitative needs for good, healthy lives. Trust in a landlord to keep residents safe and secure is therefore as much a part of housing as the physical building. My colleague Katherine Reid reflected on this in her recent blog following the Centre for London Housing summit.

There is a clear economic case for good housing, and therefore for the relational practice that is necessary to support it—but arguing only in those terms is too narrow and not very relational. To genuinely embed relational practice, we must value it intrinsically, for the quality of relationships themselves rather than any economic motive.

Where do we start?

Relational practice needs organisational conditions in which to grow and thrive. Leadership must communicate clearly and unambiguously its importance and priority, and give permission to create the time and space for it, as demonstrated by Dan Hawthorn at RBKC and Camden Council. This must be reinforced and enabled at all levels, encouraging everyone to reflect on what relational practice means for them. Because it grows through reflecting on experience and adapting practice, it needs distinct time away from daily work. Action Learning Sets offer a formal model for this, and Vikki McCall and colleagues at the University of Stirling have created a housing specific framework to support reflective and relational learning.

Psychology also tells us that people become less relational when they feel threatened; it is a natural defence mechanism. In our work at ICC, we use team-building methods that encourage senior leaders to show vulnerability and team members to share their hopes and fears. Done well, this can create foundations for psychological safety. Leadership and psychology can then combine to put residents at the centre of everyone’s work. For example, Newcastle City Council had to visit all 26,000 homes. It divided visits among all housing service staff, including leaders and internal teams, so everyone met residents in their homes. This reinforced the shared purpose of resident experience across the service, including among those who do not usually meet residents, and demonstrated organisational commitment to relational practice.

This points to another foundational factor: internal relational working is as valuable as, but distinct from, working directly with residents. Residents have an important role in shaping services, and meaningful engagement in decision-making matters. But in a technical and regulated environment, relational practice must also extend to professional colleagues outside direct resident involvement. Holding these two modes together requires complementary, but different, types of relational and reflective practice.

How is it sustained and deepened?

Because housing sits within a wider social system, practice and outcomes are not simply predictable. Continuous learning is the best way to understand what is working

in complex systems, and reflective practice creates that opportunity. This requires patience and long-term commitment. Embedding relational practice across policies, position statements and public communications both sets the ambition and creates the expectation that it will be delivered. It must also be proudly defended: it is not a “nice to have” in constrained times, but something we can no longer afford to operate without.

Where next for R&R?

In The Last Human Job, Alison Pugh explores the value of relational work in the context of AI and automation. Across a wide range of roles, relationship formation between service providers and recipients is the core work—what she calls “connective labour”. An optimistic view is that AI and automation can remove the burden of transactional activities, meaning work with little or no human relationship content, and free people to do what they do best: build relationships. Yet the history of supposedly time-saving technologies is mixed, and much recent workplace experience suggests AI has created more, not less, transactional work for people.

A more dystopian view is that AI could provide “relational” services by giving people an entity to engage with when a real person is unavailable. I believe this misunderstands what AI is and does. Simulating a human relationship is not the same as creating a real one, and it risks undermining the value of real relationships.

Most likely, a mix of these and other scenarios will emerge, driven by financial and economic motives as much as social or human ones. To navigate this landscape, we must recognise human relationships, and the practice of relationship building through shared activities between real people, as intrinsically valuable.

Reflecting on these discussions, three key points stand out for me:

• Relational practice must be prioritised from the top in housing services while also being defined and shaped at every level.
• That means giving people time and space to step back from daily work for reflection and learning, and putting residents front of mind.
• Most importantly, it has a deep value that cannot be reduced to economic benefit. Communicating that value may be the greatest challenge of all.