Introduction
Across UK social housing, the conversation around organisational design and operating models has become more urgent in recent years. Regulatory pressure, limited resources, and heightened expectations from tenants and government have placed housing providers under intense scrutiny. Many now find themselves needing to revisit foundational questions: how are we structured to deliver our strategy? Are our ways of working aligned with our purpose? And what needs to change to improve performance, resilience, and customer outcomes?
In commercial sectors, the concept of a Target Operating Model (TOM) is a familiar, non-contentious feature of strategic planning. It is used to realign capabilities and structures to strategic aims. However, in the social housing sector, the very phrase 'TOM' is often met with discomfort or even alarm. It is associated with restructures, redundancies, and a threat to the relational culture that defines many housing associations. This divergence in perception creates a particular challenge for Chief Executives and Chief People Officers: how do we lead organisational redesign in a way that is strategically sound, operationally effective, and culturally safe?
At our recent Lunch & Learn roundtable, Jane Smith, Chief People Officer at Curo, provided a candid and practical perspective on this issue. Drawing from Curo's own journey since 2023, she shared insights that hold valuable lessons for housing leaders nationally. This report distils those insights and places them in the context of wider sector research and organisational change theory.
The Operating Model as a Strategic Bridge
An operating model should be understood not as a restructure or HR-led exercise, but as the crucial bridge between an organisation's strategy and its daily execution. It answers the fundamental question: how are we set up to deliver what we say matters?
Jane Smith described Curo's operating model as an articulation of how people, processes, technology, and tools come together to fulfil the organisation's purpose. In Curo's case, that purpose is crystal clear: 'Homes for Good'. Their ten-year vision, "by 2034 everyone feels proud about the quality of our homes" is underpinned by five strategic objectives, which cascade down to a rolling three-year business plan, annual team plans, and individual objectives. This hierarchy of alignment is often referred to as the 'golden thread', and in Curo's model, the operating framework forms its backbone.
The purpose of the model, therefore, is not to impose change for its own sake, but to connect what colleagues and teams do every day with what the organisation aims to achieve. It is a tool of clarity and alignment. Jane noted that operating models should be revisited every 5–10 years, or earlier in response to major strategic shifts or external change. This cyclical view helps organisations remain fit-for-purpose in changing contexts.
Effective operating models not only make strategy deliverable—they also force organisations to make choices. What will we prioritise? What are we explicitly saying we won’t do? At Curo, this means focusing on core services supporting customers, maintaining homes, and building new ones while cutting back on projects that don’t serve those priorities. This discipline enabled the leadership team to focus investment and attention towards the organisation’s core mission.
Why Housing Needs a New Approach to Target Operating Models
One of the most widely shared reflections from the roundtable was the cultural dissonance the term 'TOM' causes in the housing sector. While widely used in commercial settings, within housing it has become synonymous with threat particularly perceived risks to jobs and community culture. As Jane explained, "In every other sector I’ve worked in, TOM is just part of strategy delivery. In this sector, it gets interpreted as restructure."
This interpretation creates barriers to engagement and can derail meaningful work. Leaders therefore need to be deliberate in how they frame organisational design conversations. At Curo, Jane lessons learnt include not to talk about the 'TOM' internally, particularly with frontline colleagues. Instead, she and her team use the operating model as an internal decision-making framework: a structured way of testing alignment and prioritisation, rather than a public brand for change.
This reflects a wider shift in sector practice. Colleagues from other housing associations at the roundtable described similar experiences where mentioning 'TOM' triggered anxiety or pushback, even without changes being proposed. The lesson is clear: language matters. Focus on purpose, service improvement, and strategic clarity. Avoid acronyms and metaphors that have acquired baggage.
As part of this shift, some organisations are actively exploring new language, talking instead about "organisational effectiveness" or "strategy delivery frameworks". Whatever the terminology, what matters is that the purpose of the work is understood and accepted by colleagues as something designed to help, not harm.
Principle-Led, Not Consultant-Led
Curo’s work was characterised by its internal, principle-led approach. Rather than engaging consultants, Jane and her colleagues developed a set of clear design principles that would shape all decisions. These included:
- Reducing duplication and waste
- Enabling digital automation and efficiency
- Limiting hierarchy to five layers between frontline and executive
- Designing roles to professional standards
- Establishing centres of expertise and shared services
Once agreed by the Executive and Board, these principles provided the 'guardrails' for decision-making. For example, when presented with a proposal to expand into Ofsted-regulated services, the team referred back to their principle of staying within the existing regulatory framework, removing debate and aligning action to strategy.
Importantly, Curo committed to an iterative implementation. "No big bang" was a deliberate design principle. Process, systems and design changes are made gradually, with each decision evaluated against agreed principles. This approach builds confidence, reduces anxiety, and allows the model to evolve as learning grows.
This was particularly important in a sector where past restructuring exercises had often resulted in fatigue and mistrust. The principle-led approach served both as a strategic compass and a reassurance mechanism, giving leaders and colleagues alike a way to measure progress without triggering the alarms often associated with major change programmes.
Building Internal Capability and Leadership Alignment
Curo also recognised that organisation design in service of an operating model change should not be a centralised or HR-only task. Instead, they built a structured toolkit for directors to lead redesign within their own functions, freedom within set principles, supported by internal coaches. This allowes for consistency without rigidity and enabled those closest to services to shape how their areas could be improved.
The toolkit included frameworks for reviewing current activities, identifying duplication, clarifying purpose, analysing job data (Curo had a significant percentage of unique job titles across the workforce), and mapping future capabilities. Crucially, this work was tied into a new leadership capability framework and cultural shift programme. Managers and leaders are being supported to understand new expectations - such as collaboration, outcome focus, and disciplined execution and to reflect on how their behaviours will evolve to achieve the 10-year strategy.
A governance mechanism was introduced to manage design changes and job alterations, with limits on leadership tiers and title creation. This ensured the integrity of the design principles over time.
The internal capability built through this process will give Curo resilience into the future. As strategy evolves and the operating environment shifts, the organisation now has both the frameworks and the skillsets to adapt without starting from scratch. It also creates a more mature leadership culture, one that understands its role not just in delivery, but in design.
Cultural Alignment and Sector-Wide Implications
Throughout the session, Jane emphasised the cultural nature of organisational design. Structure alone cannot deliver strategy; people and behaviour must change too. Curo’s operating model work explicitly included cultural components, such as embedding collaboration, increasing data-informed decision making, and designing jobs that are genuinely 'doable' and connected to purpose.
Peers at the roundtable echoed this. Whether in merged organisations, post-regulatory intervention, or customer transformation work, participants agreed: TOMs must be about culture, not just charts. They also agreed that the work 'never ends'. As Jane said, "Operating models need to live and evolve. Organisations don’t remain fixed."
The process of cultural alignment is neither fast nor linear. It requires consistent leadership behaviours, visible role modelling, and the willingness to address legacy mindsets that no longer serve the strategy. For many housing associations, this means developing new habits of cross-functional working, joint accountability, and data-driven decision-making.
It also means reshaping the relationship between the centre and the frontline, ensuring that strategic decisions are grounded in real operational experience, and that the lived experience of tenants is reflected in design choices. This is where the internal toolkit becomes not just a method for redesign, but a vehicle for learning and dialogue.
From Threat to Tool
If there is a single takeaway from this discussion, it is this: operating models should be seen as tools for strategic clarity and organisational alignment, not as signals of threat which is far too common in our sector. By using principle-led, culturally aware, internally driven approaches, housing providers can ensure their models support not just their strategy, but also their people.
Leaders should begin with purpose, agree principles, empower their teams, and resist the urge to copy-paste solutions. Most of all, they should stay clear-eyed about the risks of language. In social housing, the words we choose shape the reactions we receive. By avoiding 'TOMs' and focusing on alignment, clarity, and improvement, we can build operating models that truly deliver for our communities.
The Curo case study offers a pragmatic example of how this can be done, one grounded in strategy, delivered through leadership, and sustained by culture. It is a model not just for operating differently, but for leading differently in a sector that continues to evolve under pressure and scrutiny. The future of housing depends not only on what we deliver, but how we are designed to deliver it and on how we bring our people with us every step of the way.
If you are interested in joining our Chief People Officer community group and share best practice and challenges with like-minded Executives from across the UK, do get in touch with Tom Neely for more information.
