4 things development organizations must do to look after staff

The aid sector employs a huge number of people all over the world — a diverse, passionate, multinational workforce. But the work is also hard, conditions are often difficult, and the international nature of the job means there are unique employment challenges. Development experts pinpointed four key areas where the sector must improve if it wants to hold onto its staff. 1. Pay Remote employment means staff from different countries find themselves working alongside one another in the same role — but they don’t all get the same money. Pay equity is giving CEOs headaches. “Compensation is the thing that keeps bubbling up,” said Kim Kucinskas, director of community strategy at Humentum, who works closely with NGO leaders on workforce issues. “That's the pain point that people keep talking about.” Right now, different organizations are taking different approaches. Jon Beighle, vice president of global services at Medical Teams International, an NGO delivering humanitarian services in medical emergencies, said for head office roles, his organization hires the best person for the job and currently pays the same salary based on a global market, whatever their nationality or location. But that same level of compensation and benefits is harder to apply for field workers. “We wish we could have the same standards for everyone we employ, but our projects are funded by the U.N. or U.S. and they aren’t going to fund to that level for all employees,” he said. Beighle said he thought it might be time for government funders to think again about these approaches, which don’t fit well with the localization vision. But he said he did not expect the same from some U.N. humanitarian agencies, which are “too resource constrained” to address the issue. 2. Equity and equality Equity and equality are growing issues everywhere, but they are a particular challenge for the development sector’s multinational and multiracial workforce. Mo Ali, the co-founder of The Innovation consultancy, helps organizations work on inclusion and advised the British Parliament’s International Development Committee on its racism in aid inquiry. He said there are many levels of inequity in development, and people’s experience varied considerably, depending on a wide variety of factors, such as gender, skin color, country of origin, disability, sexual orientation, social class, and language skills. “Are you relating people's English skills with their levels of intelligence, for example,” he said. “The unconscious bias there is huge.” Not only that, there remain significant barriers to joining the sector in the first place. “When I was starting off, 20 odd years ago, you had to get a master’s degree, you had got to get a loan out to pay for it,” Ali said. “Straightaway, there are barriers that have been set up decades ago.” Staff are now much more forthright in asking for equity issues to be addressed, he said. While the development sector has always had a thick streak of activism running through it, that activism is now increasingly being applied within organizations. “You listen to the active resistors, but you ignore the heel draggers, those little quiet people who are slow walking the change.” --— Kim Kucinskas, director of community strategy, Humentum Ali stressed how passionate many development workers are about their cause. He said this can lead to a shock when idealism collides with the realpolitik of donor governments. “The sector is full of amazing and talented idealists who expect that we should be making change — that it's time for everybody to have equity and feel included,” he said. “And then they run into the reality of government procurement processes and reporting requirements and the lack of budgets, and they can't create the change that they want to see.” The result, Ali said, could be disillusionment, low morale, and ultimately, a decision to leave the sector and do something else. Tom Arcaro, a sociology professor at Elon University in North Carolina, has surveyed hundreds of humanitarian workers and identified significant levels of dissatisfaction. He said there was relatively little support for aid workers who suffer from stress. He added that there was particular frustration among aid workers in the global south at the glacial pace of change. “Just in the last five years, the access to and use of social media by people from the global south has accelerated exponentially,” he said. “Everybody's getting information about the world that is pointing out these inequities. And the hypocrisy is much clearer. “That heightened awareness on one end is a good thing. But on the other side, it makes people more aware of the array of microaggressions that they have been enduring.” One interviewee in his survey, a female worker from Ethiopia, talked about how her proposals were often ignored. “But if the same idea came from a white person, everyone said, ‘Oh, OK, let's do that,” Arcaro recalled. “And she said that happened time and time again.” Kucinskas highlighted that any shifts in power from international to local staff come with losers as well as winners. “What’s so often overlooked, especially with some of this equity-based work, is that someone could believe in the aspirations [of localization], could truly believe in it,” she said. “But what about when it affects me, when I'm afraid for my livelihood, when I'm afraid for the power that I hold, where the rubber meets the road? And that's where you get the passive resistors. All too often we forget about them. Yes, you listen to the active resistors, but you ignore the heel draggers, those little quiet people who are slow walking the change.” 3. Well-being and culture Working conditions in development can be tough. Staff are tackling difficult issues, often dealing with poverty, conflict, and crisis with limited resources and far from their homes. And many are driven by a passion for the work that can make it difficult to forget about the job at the end of the day. This means that the aid sector is also thinking hard about stress, burnout, and well-being. Beighle said these issues were a high priority for his organization and for others. “The pandemic accelerated well-being as a focus area. … A lot of people struggled,” said Beighle, whose organization employs medical professionals to deliver front-line services. “Among our front-line employees, there’s a super high level of commitment,” he said. “They’re motivated. This is what they’re called to. And we’re very intentional about looking after people. Our emergency responses are designed to have a recovery cycle. You do one or two months, and you exit to recover. That’s how it works.” But can more be done? Gemma Houldey, a former humanitarian worker, well-being consultant, and author of a book about burnout, believes it can. “I think it's very common, for a lot of aid workers, to be in high-pressure jobs where they don't ever let themselves relax and look after themselves,” she said. “I went through what I felt was a burnout when I was working in Palestine. I felt like we were up against so much in terms of actually giving support to people, and therefore questioning whether really, I was having any impact whatsoever. And in the meantime, I felt my whole identity rested on this role that I was playing. And it was 24/7 — very difficult to kind of take a break from it mentally.” Houldey said that aid work often involved living in compounds, divorced from the population of the country where the work was taking place. This could create a culture of close friendships among people who worked together every day, but it could also lead to people feeling extremely isolated, particularly if they did not readily fit into the dominant social group. Arcaro said there was relatively little support for aid workers who suffer from stress. “I know, anecdotally and from my survey data, that psychosocial support for staff within humanitarian organizations is woefully lacking,” he said. “Although now you’re more encouraged to report and act on various stresses and mental distress, there's still not enough support.” He said organizations struggle to fund support, even if they want to do more for their staff. “We have a donor sector that demands accountability and [wants to cut] anything that looks like overhead,” he said. “TLC for the staff, in terms of their mental health, that seems like extra overhead. We can't afford that, they say. And that is doubly, triply, quadruply true with the funding that goes to … humanitarian workers in the global south. They are working from contract to contract, where the contracts demand the leanest possible numbers.” In the long run, says Houldey, burnout actually leads to additional costs for the aid sector. “There’s a cost to looking after someone who is going through a mental health crisis,” she said. “Not only looking after that person, but the risks presented to the work environment when someone is going through a really tough mental health crisis, which is going to impact on their work and impacts on their behavior. There are examples of excessive alcohol use, excessive drug use. That is going to have an impact on colleagues.” “For an organizational culture to lead to change … maybe 20% actually need to actually make a shift towards an improved culture, improved way of working, calling people out. And if they do, other people will follow.” --— Mohammed Ali, co-founder, The Innovation consultancy 4. HR and leadership If the development sector is to deal with workforce challenges, that change must come from the leadership. But donors — and boards — have preferred to fund projects over core functions such as management, finance, and human resources, so staff care has been under-resourced. “A lot of organizations will feel the priority for funding is not their staff,” said Houldey. “It's the programs, it's the affected populations that are receiving the assistance.” Kucinskas said staff support was moving up the agenda. “When I asked CEOs earlier this year what are the big things you're looking to achieve in 2023, it really boiled down to culture — to workforce and wellness issues,” she said. She recalled one CEO telling her they were trying to “reweave the social fabric of the organization” and that this was typical of the approach of many leaders. But she said that changing work habits during the pandemic had put additional pressure on HR and leadership because it was more difficult to build team cohesion and monitor well-being among remote workers. Yet the increased effort of trying to care for staff has not meant increased budgets. “It’s the same team, the same capacity of the individuals,” she said. “But the pressure has increased.” What’s next? So how does the development sector address these challenges? In part, by recognizing that they are important, Ali said. CEOs and boards must prioritize them. There has been some movement. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, is an item of growing importance on board agendas, and the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly illustrated the importance of mental health and well-being. NGOs are responding to changes in pay and working conditions. Development organizations are currently in the “messy middle” of adapting to new ways of working, said Kucinskas. Right now, leaders are trying to do lots of things: figure out what they want the organization of the future to look like, understand the changes needed to make that happen, and communicate those ideas to staff. Ali stressed the importance of changing organizational habits when there was not a crisis going on and when staff and leadership could make it a priority. He also stressed how it was important to shift the behaviors of certain key individuals. “For an organizational culture to lead to change,” he said, “maybe 20% actually need to actually make a shift towards an improved culture, improved way of working, calling people out. And if they do, other people will follow.”