UNICEF: Global Week of Reflection on Organizational Culture

From: uMessage
Sent: 28 June 2019 22:16
Subject: Global Week of Reflection

Dear colleagues,

Thank you all very much for your active participation in yesterday’s Global Town Hall meeting, and for your warm welcome to me personally in this exciting new post of Organizational Culture Advisor, established by the Executive Director to focus on reassessing, reshaping, and reaffirming UNICEF’s organizational culture in support of our mission, goals and strategy. This is the first of many communications I will be sharing with you as part of our UNICEF-wide dialogue about organizational culture.

As mentioned during the Town Hall, we are launching a conversation next week on organizational culture, starting with the Global Week of Reflection from July 1-7. This is the start of an interactive dialogue that I hope will continue in different forums with many of you on these important issues.

I am pleased to share some ideas and suggestions as you prepare for the Global Week of Reflection in your teams/offices/divisions:

• The purpose of the Global Week of Reflection is to step back from our regular busy schedules, in order to reflect on what kind of workplace environment we have presently in our teams/offices/divisions, and what kind of workplace environment we want to have. What is the UNICEF workplace that we want to co-create?
• As part of this, we encourage you to review the ITF report’s recommendations and discuss which of them you think are relevant to implement for your team/office/division.
• Here are some possible questions you may wish to discuss:

1. What does a healthy, values-based, organizational culture look like for UNICEF – in concrete terms? 
2. What is working well in our team/office/division that we can further strengthen in terms of organizational culture?
3. What do we need to improve in our team/office/division in terms of organizational culture?
4. What actions can I take as an individual to concretely improve our workplace culture? What things can we can do differently as ateam/office/division? What actions can we take to improve our systems/processes?
5. Following on from the ITF report, what would ‘success’ look like in 1 year from now?

• Please feel free to add/revise questions to make the reflection exercise more relevant to you and your context. The above questions are simply suggestions to get you started.

• We recommend that teams/offices/divisions organize themselves to discuss the above in whichever way works best for you. In some cases, it may be via an all-staff meeting, while in others, it may be led by the Staff Association or done in a management team meeting or in several small groups. You may wish to block a few hours to have these discussions, or you might choose to have several shorter discussions spread out over the course of days or weeks. Whichever forum or modality you use, please do ensure that it is an environment in which all staff feel safe and comfortable to speak up and share their ideas.
• I would very much appreciate hearing the outcomes of your discussions especially your ideas to how we can strengthen our organizational culture and implement the recommendations of the ITF report. Please send these ideas and suggestions to orgculture@unicef.org

While we have proposed to have the discussions take place over next week, we understand that for some teams, this may not be feasible. Therefore, please do take the time you need for these reflections - we encourage you to continue the conversations over the coming weeks and months, as this itself is part of the culture change we are striving for.

We will compile and share your ideas and suggestions via ICON and other platforms on an ongoing basis, so that we can be inspired by each other’s different ideas, innovative practices, and creative solutions to organizational culture issues. We are at the beginning of a journey towards a more respectful, empowering workplace culture in UNICEF and we count on everyone to make this happen together.

Thank you!

Geeta