It’s no secret that to remain relevant you have to evolve, and like many traditional organisations and companies we realise HERA has to do this too. Having overcome the funding constraints of the past years and with a stronger steel construction forecast ahead – the time seems right.
As an industry owned, member driven organisation we know that what we do has to bring value to you – and that’s why we recently asked our members for candid feedback so we could make changes that made sense.
So what exactly would make HERA membership more valuable?
We’re here to serve the metals industry, and below the surface we work hard to be the value that underpins our industry – supporting where and when we can. You told us that you respect and recognise that, but that we need to get better at sharing these values by stepping it up and getting more with the times.
Thanks to your insights, we now have ten key areas we’ll be focusing on to be the association you need us to be.
How will we do it?
HERA is an organisation with many hats – and one thing we’ve realised on this journey is that we need to get better at wearing each of them equally so we bring value to the wide and varied base that make up our membership
This means a commitment from all our divisions to voice and provide areas of interest to you more regularly. In the coming months we’ll be working with our key managers to make a plan of attack that allows us to do just that.
We also hear that you want more HERA reports to inform you better – and while we’re not planning to increase our existing research programmes, we can see that this needs to be reviewed to discover if there might be a way for us to deliver more outcomes here.
Some of the feedback brought new ideas to the table to help inform our improvements – but we also found that some of your expectations stepped beyond the bounds of what we’re legally able to do under the Levy Act we’re funded by. What we take from this is we need to better set your expectations by making it clearer: who HERA is, what we do, how we can help, and most importantly who can fill the gaps for the areas we can’t cover. As we upgrade our website, we’ll make sure this point is addressed – but don’t forget our door is always open if you need clarity now.
Lastly, we’ve learnt you want us to start being a more guiding hand and all important ‘finger on the pulse’ – giving our views, insights and commentary around what’s happening in our industry and what it means for you. Honestly, we believed we were doing this through HERA News – but thanks to your feedback we can see this can be done more effectively, and that’s provoked a shakeup in our communications approach. This year we’ll be investigating better ways to get news to you, improving our website so its user friendly, and changing our content and the way we write it.
HERA’s new walk, talk and feel
It’s a new approach, and it’s all informed by your feedback! Stay tuned and watch out for notifications next Monday on Twitter and LinkedIn to get more details on these survey results as they go live.
