At home for UNICEF : Tim Sutton

By Tim Sutton

So … working from home is the thing now. Why make the daily trip to the office, do our work and then come home again, when you can throw on sweatpants, switch on the laptop and turn your kitchen table into your office. Working from home is now as normal as Mondayitis and casual Fridays and still essential in many places as the world continues to grapple with the pandemic.

Working from home helps keep us safe, it’s greener; it can help us be more productive; it can help build teamwork; it saves money; it promotes work life balance. It’s a good thing for you, for me, for the planet, right?

Over my last two years with UNICEF, I spent a considerable amount of time working from home, first in response to a terror event and then more recently the pandemic. Online meetings, online trainings, online social events, online collaboration spaces, online coffee, an online Christmas party, we can online anything, anytime, from anywhere. Being able to do all this from home was miraculous for me and for the UNICEF team. Being able to do our work and scale up our support for Children working from home was amazing.

Finding ways to keep the team on track and motivated and using online tools to support each other was challenging, but incredibly rewarding. Being able to do all this from home and spending more time with family was a gift for me and for my family. Having me around all day, hearing my contributions to my many important meetings throughout the day – lucky family!

Having recently returned to New Zealand after more than 25 years with UNICEF, with the stated ambition of becoming a domestic god, I am now on the other side of what I am beginning to understand as the working from and working for home situation.

Now I am working “for” home, making compost, cooking meals, doing school drop offs and pickups, vacuuming, shopping, gardening. My partner is now the one going out to work each day; for a salary and an employer who also supports work “from” home. And I now admit that, when I used to work from home, I took things a little bit for granted.

Now that home is my space during the day, I am challenged to share this space and adapt my routines to accommodate the schedule of my partner working from home. When I worked from home rather than for home, my partner and the family had to make similar, possibly more disruptive changes. I realize that I barely recognized or acknowledged this.

I have always believed that UNICEF’s work is truly the most important work; I joined UNICEF because I wanted to change the world and I believed, and I still do, that UNICEF is the very best organization to join if you want to influence or help bring about lasting positive change for children, their families and our planet.

Since March 2020, nearly every UNICEF staff member has had at some stage to work from home. UNICEF quickly adapted to this, in terms of systems and processes and how we supported staff and teams. At all levels and locations, UNICEF staff continued to do amazing work and has shown time and again that we do make a difference for children, under the most difficult and unusual circumstances and on a global scale.

What has largely not been acknowledged are the huge changes, in whatever form they take, that our families had to accommodate. Of course, UNICEF recognizes the important role the families play in enabling UNICEF staff members to succeed. Various allowances, grants and initiatives within Country Offices and even across some of our regions are evidence of this. But organization-wide we perhaps don’t yet understand what working from home means for the home-makers.

The way UNICEF works has changed more rapidly during the pandemic than at any other time in UNICEF’s history. It has helped to make UNICEF a better, more responsive, more focused, more efficient organization. Working from home or working or at a distance has demonstrated the potential for an even larger reimagining of how UNICEF manages and deploys its staff - its most important asset. I am sure UNICEF will grasp these enormous and transformative opportunities. And let us hope that the organization UNICEF will see the point of supporting the wider UNICEF family, who do so much and ultimately enables “working from home” by “working for home”.

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