Case study: providing fresh insights and support for St Mungo's

St Mungo's is a leading UK homelessness charity supporting over 3150 people every night. With a team of over 1,000 employees, St Mungo’s mission is to end rough sleeping in the UK by 2026.

Why Voco?

St Mungo’s believes in supporting its team members with the opportunities they need to make progress in their careers, but historically those efforts had focused on internal knowledge transfer and sector specific communities of best practice. 

Voco offered St Mungo’s Learning & Development team a new opportunity to support some of its key team members with access to fresh perspectives and external ideas and insights from relevant peers in different organisations and sectors. 

‍Giving licence to learn

Voco also offered a safe space for St Mungo’s team members to explore different career topics and themes without internal politics or conflicts of interest, giving them licence to focus on their own learning while broadening their horizons.

Since engaging with Voco, participants have taken on new projects, explored new partnerships and have invested more time in their own development as they felt more empowered and supported to do so.

Powerful outcomes

St Mungo’s participants identified four clear outcomes that have helped them take more control of their careers thanks to Voco:

• Acute problem solving: in a tricky year at the charity, Voco helped St Mungo’s team members to workshop issues at hand in real time with someone who could provide a completely fresh point of view. The collaborative nature of Voco conversations also unlocked forgotten or underused capabilities and skills.

• Accountability: routine Voco conversations helped St Mungo’s members to stay on track with their goals and ambitions, thanks to monthly check-ins with their peer matches. The content prompts provided by Voco allowed for each conversation to build on the last.

• Career strategy: Voco conversations empowered members to take action to move their careers forward, providing an impetus to try new things that made them more effective at work. Voco also enabled members to explore their career progress at different life stages.

• Wellbeing: having a safe space to talk increased feelings of wellbeing amongst participants and they valued their employer for giving them access to that space. Users talked about increased confidence and assertiveness, and feeling more open to change as a result of Voco.

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“Voco has enabled us to take a new approach to supporting our team members, by giving them access to fresh thinking, and empowering them to go and seek out new ideas and connections. Focusing on, and investing in, the peer space has been significantly more impactful than typical hierarchical interventions or training, and Voco has allowed us to effortlessly offer more people access to truly meaningful career support."

Paul Wells, Head of Learning & Development, St Mungo's

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