Gewobag

Fixing how things get fixed for Berlin Public Housing

Situation

Germany is short of 1.9 million affordable apartments, 700.000 of which should be social housing. This squeeze means that those living in urban areas feel at the mercy of landlords. Anyone able to secure an affordable place to live may not feel emboldened to stand up for their rights or complain about poor service standards. This is even more true for tenants of publicly subsidised housing.

My work at Gewobag Berlin centered on re-designing workflows around energy and heat distribution services. In winter months, tenants would sometimes wait weeks before heating and warm water would be restored after a breakdown.

Task

Over the course of three years, I slowly expanded the scope of my design work at Gewobag from the initial review of a stalled IoT-project to shifting the organisation’s focus from an internalistic, process-centered view towards an appreciation for pain points of their core users: tenants. After much debate, we settled on a shared goal: reducing first-time-fix rates.

Action

For the first time ever, user needs of all involved stakeholders were mapped and embedded into the larger organisational context. This allowed to create empathy for all the various humans involved in ensuring a broken boiler is fixed a quickly as possible: Tenants, contact center agents, internal technical, purchasing and controlling staff, eventually dispatchers and technicians on the ground, outsourced to a network of external service partners.

What emerged was a range of measures: we started with simple, tailor made MS PowerBI dashboards that allowed better situational awareness for support teams. Later, conflict-solving workshops between departments and eventually the overhaul of entire software suites along with their accompanying process chains followed, auditing SaaS providers so that legacy SAP workflows could be phased out.

While continuing this ground-work, we developed a no-bullshit vision for how Gewobag can make use of LLM-enabled support agents that give IoT-equipped buildings the ability to participate in conversations and make informed decisions.

Result

By involving crucial staff members in the design process, we slowly created a new sense of empowerment within a team previously exhausted from high workload and frequent turn-over. Once sceptical of the intervention, they turned into evangelists for the solutions they helped create. Results for tenants will become tangible this spring, once the pilot phase for new software and workflows is reviewed.