As organisations across the construction and housing sectors grapple with skills shortages, employee retention and the need to build sustainable talent pipelines, creating a culture where people can thrive has never been more important. For the RE:GEN Group, people development, wellbeing and purpose are not separate initiatives but fundamental drivers of business success.
With more than 500 employees and a mission to enhance lives through safe, sustainable social housing regeneration, RE:GEN Group has built a reputation for putting its people at the heart of its growth strategy. That commitment was recognised when the organisation achieved Best Companies' 3 Star World Class accreditation for the second consecutive year.
In this Q&A, Ruth Dent, Chief Experience Officer at RE:GEN Group, shares how the organisation is creating clear career pathways, investing in learning and development, supporting wellbeing, and maintaining a strong culture across a growing workforce, while helping to shape the future talent pipeline for the social housing sector.
Q: Can you talk us through RE:GEN Group’s learning and development strategy and how it supports both individual career progression and business goals? What sets it apart from other companies?
A: Our philosophy is quite simple: we want people to be able to build a career at RE:GEN, not simply have a job here.
Over the past year we've put much more structure around what that means. We've introduced role bandings so colleagues can understand where they are today and what progression could look like. We've reviewed job descriptions to incorporate competencies and softer skills, and we've built structured development planning into TRIBE, our online internal platform.
Our mentoring programme, which initially focused on senior and middle managers, is now available to all colleagues. We're also investing in external leadership development and earlier this year launched our first women in leadership programme, backed by the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB).
What makes our approach powerful, though, is that we don't look at development in isolation from the business.
We're asking: Where does this person want to go? What potential do we see in them? What capability will RE:GEN need in the future? And how do we bring those things together? When those things align, learning becomes much more meaningful because we're developing the individual and strengthening the organisation at the same time. You shouldn’t have to compromise one for the other to prosper.
Q: In a business with a strong operational focus, how do you ensure learning and development opportunities are accessible and meaningful for site-based colleagues as well as office staff?
A: We have colleagues working in very different roles and environments, so equality of opportunity doesn’t necessarily mean delivering development in exactly the same way.
The important thing is that wherever somebody works within RE:GEN - on site, in an office or across our communities - they understand what progression looks like and access development that is relevant to them.
Our role bandings, competency frameworks and development planning give us a consistent foundation across the group, but from there we tailor development around the role and the individual.
RE:GEN Academy is a great example of that approach in practice. At the heart of the academy is the combination of theory and classroom-based learning with practical, hands-on experience on site. It means people aren't simply learning something in a classroom; they're able to put that knowledge into practice in a real working environment and develop the skills and confidence our industry actually needs.
Ultimately, development has to be meaningful, not just available. An apprentice starting their career, a colleague working on site, an office-based manager and a senior leader will all need different things from us. Our responsibility is to create the right opportunities for each of them, so where somebody works or the role they perform never becomes a barrier to their development or progression.
Q: How has investment in learning and development impacted employee engagement, retention and/or internal progression?
A: Our current group attrition rate is 12%,compared with the industry average of 20–30% and in the last year, seven per cent of colleagues across the group received promotions. Those numbers matter, but there's something behind them that's equally important: people need to be able to imagine their future with an organisation. So, for us, internal progression is one of the strongest measures of success.
Our people engagement process (RE:PEP) gives colleagues structured opportunities to talk about what they've achieved, where they want to go and what support they need to get there. Development therefore becomes an ongoing conversation rather than something that happens once a year.
If somebody can join RE:GEN, develop their skills, increase their confidence, take on greater responsibility and ultimately become one of our future leaders, that's incredibly powerful. And importantly, it means we're not just recruiting for the business we are today. We're developing the people who can help us become the business we want to be tomorrow.
Q: What initiatives do you have in place for apprentices, graduates, or early-career professionals, and how do these programmes contribute to long-term cultural strength?
A: This is an area we're particularly passionate about because we don't believe the future workforce of construction will simply appear -as an industry, we have to create it.
RE:GEN Academy is central to that. Around 10% of our workforce enters the business through the academy via apprenticeships, helping us attract new talent and create accessible routes into our industry.
But our ambition goes beyond recruitment into RE:GEN itself. We want to create genuine, sustainable pathways into employment for the wider sector, particularly for people living in the communities where regeneration is taking place. As the academy is directly connected to RE:GEN Group, our clients and our supply chain, we have real-world visibility of the skills and jobs that are needed. That means we can work backwards from genuine employment demand, combining classroom-based learning with practical, on-site experience to give people skills that can lead somewhere meaningful.
In FY25/26, the academy supported 222 learners across all of our provision, from funded skills programmes through to commercial learning and our ‘Beyond the Doorstep’ continuing professional development.
And we're seeing that translate into real outcomes. We ended with a 74% progression rate of learners advancing into employment opportunities - many of whom were social housing customers (tenants).Testament to the fact that we don't just want to regenerate homes. We want to create opportunities that can change lives long after the works are complete.
Q: How does RE:GEN Group balance professional development with wellbeing, particularly in a fast-paced and project-driven environment?
A: We don't really see the two as separate. If you want somebody to perform, learn, challenge themselves and progress, you also have to create an environment where they feel supported, connected and psychologically safe.
Construction can be fast-paced and demanding, so wellbeing has to be part of the way we operate rather than something we occasionally talk about. We have wellbeing champions, work in partnership with The Lighthouse Charity, and use initiatives such as the Kudos Café to recognise our people and bring colleagues together. We've also welcomed organisations such as The Art of Brilliance to help us think differently about happiness, resilience and wellbeing.
But some of the most powerful things are actually the experiences our people choose to take part in together. Charity challenges and fundraising have become a real part of life at RE:GEN. In June, colleagues took on the Three Peaks Challenge and more recently 18 of our people ran the Great North Run in support of Macmillan.
Those things matter. They're obviously about raising money and supporting brilliant causes, but they're also about connection, teamwork and having shared experiences outside of the working environment. They strengthen relationships across different teams and parts of the group. And ultimately, wellbeing also comes down to everyday leadership. It's knowing your people, noticing when something isn't right, creating space for honest conversations and making it acceptable to say, "I need some support."
For us, a high-performance culture shouldn't mean continually asking people to give more. It should mean creating an environment where people can work hard, feel supported, enjoy being part of the team, develop and thrive.
Q: How do you measure the effectiveness of your culture and L&D initiatives, and how does this impact future improvements?
A: We deliberately look at culture through several different lenses because no single metric can tell you whether people are thriving. Best Companies gives us independent colleague feedback. We look at retention, internal progression, workforce diversity and engagement. RE:PEP and development plans allow us to track individual progression, while our operational KPIs and dashboards give us visibility of performance across projects and teams.
We're also undertaking an internal EDI audit to understand where we are today and create a targeted action plan for improvement rather than making assumptions about where change is needed.
But measurement only has value if you're prepared to do something with what you learn. For us, it should be a continuous cycle:
Listen. Learn. Act. Measure. Repeat.
That's how culture continues to move forward.
Q: Tell us about the culture you have at RE:GEN Group? What drives it and makes it what it is today?
A: I'd describe RE:GEN as ambitious, caring, challenging and very human.
Our values - we care, we’re dynamic, we challenge the norm and we’re trusted - capture the culture we're trying to create. They're there to guide our actions and the way we do business every single day.
We're ambitious and we want to grow. We want people to challenge established thinking and find better ways of doing things. But equally, we care enormously about how we achieve that growth, how we treat one another, our clients and the communities in which we work.
Our ‘One Tribe, One Vibe’ culture really captures that sense of collective identity. It was built around a simple idea: despite different business units, regions, roles and locations, we are one group bound by one purpose.
Our people create RE:GEN's culture every day. Our responsibility as leaders is to protect it, nurture it and create the conditions for the very best of it to flourish.
Q: From a people perspective, what do you believe genuinely sets RE:GEN Group’s culture apart from others in the sector?
A: I think it's the connection between people, purpose and possibility.
We genuinely care about our people, but we're also prepared to challenge them and invest in their potential. We're creating clearer career pathways, mentoring people, developing future leaders and opening our sector to people who may never previously have imagined a career within it. And that philosophy doesn't stop at the boundary of our own organisation.
What genuinely sets our culture apart is that we don't see people and culture as something that sits alongside our business strategy. It is part of our business strategy.
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