Special News--June 2021Staff Wellbeing--Getting it Right!
New Resources from the Humanitarian Sector"Staff are humans with intrinsic worth and not just resources with strategic worth.
We appreciate staff for who they are as well as for what they do."
Global Member Care, Volume 1, page 158
Image courtesy and ©2021 KOD---------- In this Update we focus on staff wellbeing, drawing primarily on recent materials from the humanitarian sector. For many of us, it's a good time to pause and probe how our staff are faring throughout our organizations. An underlying theme is the importance of developing and safeguarding a "healthy" organizational culture that prioritizes the wellness, work, and integrity of leaders, managers, and staff.
The materials consist of practical guidelines, reports, and presentations. Many items are from the Core Humanitarian Standard Alliance, a familiar go-to source for guidance and interaction among colleagues in the humanitarian, development, mission, and other sectors.
We also feature Global Integrity Day (9 June 2021). This special day focuses on living in integrity in all we do throughout the entire year (e.g., our lifestyles, work ethics, honesty in relationships, etc.). This year's theme is on Corruption and Poverty and there are various resources on the website addressing the many facets of integrity and corruption.
Save the date!
Special event for Global Integrity Day (GID), 9 June 2021
Organized by the Faith and Public Integrity Network
and featuring the work of the Association for a More Just Society
More details forthcoming on the GID website.
Applications. We encourage you to take some time to look through the materials below. Choose a couple items for further review. Consider the applications for you and your settings. One example could be considering afresh your own work-life balance including the role of mutual support between colleagues. Another example could involve organizational culture: "How does our organization concretely value the wellbeing of all our staff and their families--local, national, volunteer, international, etc.?"
Finally, we continue to share Reflections and Resources for Covid Care (click the link for access). These materials have been compiled over the past year to support you, others in your life, and your work in mission and member care. We also acknowledge that there are many views about this pandemic including how best to manage it and future pandemics via science, policy, and public cooperation.
Warm greetings,
Kelly and Michèle
MCAresources@gmail.com
--Share your comments and resources on our MCA Facebook page
--Forward to your colleagues and networks (link to sign up is at the end).
Featured Resources
Staff Wellbeing--Getting it Right!
New Resources from the Humanitarian Sector
Image courtesy and ©2021 KOD
"Let us grow and work together to significantly upgrade our personnel practices and organizational governance. Organizational cultures and leaders must foster genuine transparency and accountability. Guidelines for managing conflicts, grievances, and whistle blowing for organizational misconduct must be developed and practiced. Abusive leadership, inept management, harassment, low morale, excessive staff turnover, and political maneuvering are definitely and sadly part of the mission/aid sector. How can we learn from organizations that are modeling healthy personnel/organizational practices. Will we have the courage to bring our struggles into the light and change as needed?" Global Member Care, Volume 1, page 19
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1. Living Our Values: Care, Culture, and Power in Aid Organisations (20-21 May 2021). CHS Alliance Initiative to Cultivate Caring and Compassionate Aid Organisations. The presentations/materials are to be posted shortly online along with a registry of resources (check the CHS Alliance website). We attended the two days and really appreciated the content and interactions.
“This free virtual gathering is the first of its kind in our sector which will bring together leaders and practitioners who are interested in the question of how we live our values in aid organisations. The combined focus of how we treat ourselves and our staff brings together themes of power, privilege, identity, culture and wellbeing in aid. We will be asking together how do we move towards more compassion, equity, inclusion, accountability and solidarity?...Over the two days, we will have live interviews and panels alongside workshops and discussions as well as opportunities for virtual networking and peer discussions across the sector.”
2. Leading Well: Aid Leaders Perspectives on Staff Wellbeing and Organisational Culture (April 2021). CHS Alliance and ICVA. “Leaders identified five key challenges to staff well-being and supportive organisational culture. First, professionalisation and bureaucratisation have turned us into what CWS Asia’s Marvin Parvez described as “paper tigers” drowning in a sea of compliance requirements. Second, our sense of control is naturally tested by the stressful contexts and situations in which we find ourselves, which can be traumatising. Third, the rewards offered by the work are sometimes not adequate enough to satisfy our perfectionist tendencies and willingness to sacrifice our well-being for the cause. Fourth, our workplace relationships and sense of fairness are negatively affected by the internalisation of oppressive systems–patriarchy, neo-colonialism, white supremacy and others. And fifth, our personal and organisational values can seem mismatched once we realise that competition is often the key driver in our sector, not compassion.” (excerpt, Executive Summary, p. 3)
3. Working Well? Aid Worker Wellbeing and How to Improve It (2020). Melissa Pitotti and Mary Ann Clements, CHS Alliance. This report provides a summary of the findings of the CHS Alliance-incubated Initiative to Cultivate Caring, Compassionate Aid Organisations and proposes an inclusive, multi-stakeholder process as a way forward to address the findings.” (page 2). It also provides a list of several key resources/developments over the years from the humanitarian sector on staff wellbeing.
Image courtesy and ©2021 KOD
4. Human Resources Toolkit for Small and Medium Organisations (2021). Cornerstone OnDemand Foundation and CHS Alliance. “This 36-page toolkit provides resources to inform and support the enhancement of a formalized and systematized framework for people management practices in nonprofit, humanitarian and development organizations. [It includes] guidance, tips, and checklists to inform the development and/or enhancement of HR policies;…a series of questions to reflect and assess existing HR framework (and possible gaps), and identify the required activities and priority actions to strengthen it;…[and] recommended learning resources to address identified gaps.” (quote from the website)
5. Leading Wellbeing: How to Empower Healthy, Happy, and Productive People (March 2021). DiasterReady. This is an engaging, practical and short e-book. Create a free account with DiasterReady to access it along with over 1000 free learning resources relevant for the humanitarian and other sectors.
6. Project FAIR (Fairness in Aid Worker Remuneration). University of Edinburgh et al. “Within the international aid sector most organisations remunerate their national and international employees on different scales. The differences between the pay and benefits scales within this so-called dual salary system are often extreme, reflecting challenges of attracting skilled international workers to difficult contexts, whilst remunerating national employees appropriately within their local economy. Project FAIR builds upon a strong body of research into the psychological impact of these disparate salaries in the sector, in particular their impact on some employees’ motivation, performance, and retention, and thereby aid activities. We aim to create a collaborative space for discussion of practical, evidence-based alternatives to the dual salary system that enable aid and development organisations to maximise their contributions to decent work, sustainable livelihood, and poverty eradication.” (quote from website)
7. Going Further--See These Resources:
--Voices and Videos: Lessons from the Humanitarian Trenches
Global Integration Update (March 2015)
--Helping the Helpers: 50 Resources for Humanitarian Workers
Global Integration Update (October 2017)
--Engaging in Humanity Care: Stress, Trauma, and Humanitarian Work
O'Donnell, Pidcoke, and Lewis O'Donnell (May 2020)
--Five Years on from the World Humanitarian Summit, Lots of Talk But No Revolution
Overseas Development Institute, UK (24 May 2021)
Save the date!
Special event for Global Integrity Day (GID), 9 June 2021
Organized by the Faith and Public Integrity Network
and featuring the work of the Association for a More Just Society
More details forthcoming on the GID website.
8. Global Integrity Day, 9 June 2021. Living our values: Be the people we need--Build the world we need. This is a special day to reflect, teach, and collaborate on ways to integrate integrity in all we do throughout the entire year. The website contains many materials and resources, coordinated by Kelly and Michèle O’Donnell.
This year's theme is Corruption and Poverty. Here are three quotes from the website to encourage you to explore the site more.
--Global Integrity Day is a strategic day to promote a) cultivating lifestyles of integrity from the individual through the international levels; b) joining together to address the causes and consequences of corruption in its many forms; and c) working towards just and equitable societies marked with wellbeing for all people and for the planet.
--The Costs of Corruption (UN Secretary-General Guterres' message for Anti-Corruption Day 2018). "Every year, trillions of dollars - equivalent to more than five percent of global GDP - are paid in bribes or stolen through corruption.”
--To resolutely "end poverty in all its forms everywhere" (SDG 1) how can we "substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms" (SDG 16.5)? How can multi-dimensional probity (integrity at all levels: individual, institutional, international) help to end corruption's devastating role in multi-dimensional poverty?
