UNHCR’s Response to COVID Underscores Its Commitment to People
Addressing the logistical, medical, and emotional needs of staff has elevated the value of personal connection and the power of humanity.
By Amy Lynn Smith, Independent Writer + Strategist
Nearly everyone in the world was caught off-guard by COVID-19. At first, most people thought it would be contained or temporary. But when the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared it a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, people everywhere had to rethink everything they had planned — not just for days or weeks, but now closing in on nearly two years.
It was a particular challenge for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and its Division of Human Resources (HR), which includes the Medical Section. After all, they are responsible for people working all over the world — some in Headquarters offices, others in unfamiliar duty stations, and some in parts of the world where risks always run high. But with COVID, nearly every part of the world became high-risk very quickly. And yet, there were differences from country to country and from one duty station to the next that created a very complex puzzle for UNHCR to solve in the constantly shifting landscape of the pandemic.
Putting people first
“HR is about humans,” says Stephan Grieb, Deputy Director for Human Resources, who started in his position just as WHO had declared COVID a global pandemic. “At first, certain parts of the world were more impacted by the pandemic than others, so we had to make sure we were offering the support to our people there who were making the decisions.”
Grieb says what took HR by surprise the most was when borders began shutting down — a majority of them all at once. UNHCR has personnel working in what the organization refers to as “hardship duty stations,” where they are given just a few days off every month to return home to visit their families. Initially, HR told these personnel they would have to stay in their duty station longer but would then get a longer break to visit family.
“At first we thought it would be temporary,” Grieb says, echoing what much of the world assumed. “So that worked for a few weeks or a month, but then it started getting problematic, because if we couldn’t get people in we couldn’t get people out. It was quite a roller coaster ride — and it still is.”
As was the case in every region and country where UNHCR has a presence, it was necessary to rethink the way the organization operates. For personnel assigned to some of those hardship duty stations, UNHCR returned to an old strategy that had fallen out of use because it isn’t very efficient: People would spend about a month and a half in the duty station and then be replaced by someone else for the next six weeks or so — which meant doubling the staff.
UNHCR created plans to get people in and out of the country — and deliver personal protective equipment such as masks — which sometimes required scheduling special flights. But then UNHCR had to find another country that would let them in, knowing there was a chance they might be bringing COVID with them.
“We had the option of evacuating some colleagues into Europe, but the authorities did not always accept COVID patients who had no link to Switzerland,” Grieb explains. “Even the people in European duty stations, which — with notable exceptions — are more comfortable, couldn’t always travel to be with their families, whether they were sick or not.”
One solution does not fit all
According to Grieb, there was no way to come up with a single approach, especially because every country has its own rules and regulations regarding COVID. First, it was a matter of which countries were closing their borders first. But then it became a question of how to keep operations running when governments ordered everyone to work from home.
As he explains, it’s one thing if someone works in payroll or administration, making it relatively easy to work from home — although many people wanted to work from a different country, so they could be near family, which wasn’t always possible. But for personnel who are responsible for refugee protection alongside communities, for example, it’s an entirely different scenario. They have a home at their duty station they could work from, but they couldn’t leave the country.
“You can’t ensure the international protection of refugees in Somalia from Geneva — that just doesn’t work,” Grieb says. “Many of our colleagues take risks every day, but COVID created a more acute type of risk. One of our biggest strengths is being able to actually talk to refugees, so how can we do that while ensuring the safety of everyone involved?”
As a result, HR put numerous protocols in place, many of which had only been used by doctors until COVID, such as mask-wearing and other safety precautions. But in many cases, government personnel and UNHCR’s partners were leaving countries while UNHCR remained on the ground. At first, Grieb says, everyone was running on adrenaline. Now that experts better understand COVID, UNHCR has better information on protecting its personnel. Plus, vaccines are becoming more widely available — but there aren’t enough to go around.
“Getting our personnel vaccinated doesn’t solve the issue,” he explains. “We should get the refugees and host communities vaccinated as well. So it has been a bit of a hodgepodge of evaluating risk and trying to mitigate the risk.”
Some of this was the result of varying restrictions in every country, along with differing infection rates and hospital capacities. That required Headquarters to give local operations more flexibility in order to keep personnel in their duty stations while keeping them as safe as possible.
“The main goal was to stay and do everything to fulfill our mandate,” Grieb says. “But that doesn’t mean you stay at all costs. Everybody had their own ways of coping and moving forward.”
Although the challenges of adapting to the pandemic continue, especially with the surge of the Delta variant, Grieb says there have been some lessons learned already with more to be evaluated when time permits. Perhaps the most significant so far? The importance of human contact.
“You just can’t get that human contact over the computer, so we really value the informal relationships we’ve developed more now that we see how things operate when they are lacking,” he says. “Since this all began, we’ve had to talk to people, listen to them, hear their stress and help them out the best way we can — being a bit more human.”
Attending to urgent medical needs
Naturally, when protecting the lives of UNHCR personnel and their families in the midst of a pandemic, medical expertise is essential. Like Grieb, Sanjay Kumar Choudhary, M.D., Senior Medical Officer of the Staff Health and Wellbeing Service for the UNHCR Medical Section, joined UNHCR in August 2020 — in the midst of the pandemic. Dr. Choudhary has nearly two decades working in the field for various agencies, and at UNHCR he assists the WHO with interagency support for its Medical Coordination Unit.
This centralization has increased efficiency, an important factor when there are personnel on call every hour of every day, which means they often work for days on end. “There was a time when I was sleeping maybe four hours a day,” Dr. Choudhary says.
One of the most complex tasks for the Medical Coordination Unit is evacuating people who have contracted COVID. Because of the wide range of medical capabilities and services available from country to country, the situation can be very different depending on where someone’s duty station is. What’s more, at first many countries would not accept patients, but WHO made arrangements with certain governments where patients could be transported.
“In the medevac site, for two weeks it will be really busy and then suddenly there will be a pause for a week, which means only one or two cases,” Dr. Choudhary explains. “There was a time when we had to evacuate nine personnel from different regions and time zones, which was a major challenge.”
Evacuations are a complex process. A decision has to be made if the local facilities can provide sufficient care, especially based on a patient’s risk factors. If a patient has to be evacuated, they could be transported anywhere in the world, based on countries that are well-equipped and accepting patients.
But for all the anguish medical professionals like Dr. Choudhary have faced — including the deaths of family members as he did — saving hundreds, if not thousands, of lives renews their motivation.
Protecting personnel from COVID
Another essential aspect of the work Dr. Choudhary and his colleagues do is making sure staff is healthy enough to continue working during a high-risk pandemic — and giving them tools and information to protect themselves. Medical staff go through personnel files to determine if people are fit to work in the midst of a pandemic depending on their routine health status.
Medical experts have also been hosting meetings with teams from various countries and locations. They provide information on mitigating the risk of contracting COVID — which is particularly high for the medical personnel themselves, who are working with sick patients — and answer questions. In the early days, there were many questions about the disease itself, because scientists were still learning about how it spread and infected people. Now the questions are more likely to be about vaccinations, making combating misinformation one of the tasks.
“Many people contact me because they don’t want to ask questions in a public meeting,” Dr. Choudhary says. “If they need some medical advice, whether or not they have COVID, we are always here to support that.”
Communicating about COVID
Shari Nijman, Communications Officer for the Division of Human Resources, joined UNHCR about six months before the start of the pandemic. At the time, conversations were largely about providing strong and reliable overall support for the UNHCR personnel who are serving persons of concern.
Beginning in February and March 2020, the emphasis of her work quickly changed to communicating about the emerging COVID situation, while still focusing on the needs of staff. Fortunately, Nijman had some experience diving into and writing about the impact of infectious diseases, having reported on the aftermath of SARS while in graduate school in Hong Kong.
In the early days of the pandemic, Nijman and her colleagues focused on making sure people were informed — able to separate fact from fiction and to protect themselves without getting swept up in anxiety. Simple steps like posting signs about hand-washing were part of the initial response, but there was already a concern about fear interfering with UNHCR’s multicultural community.
“Early on we had the idea of taking a sort of ‘lessons learned’ approach, by speaking with our colleagues in China and Bangkok about how they dealt with the first 30 days of the pandemic,” Nijman says. “We didn’t know how things would develop, so we were trying to get ahead of the story of what was happening.”
Not long after, the Swiss government put the country on lockdown. This impacted everyone in Geneva on both a professional and personal level, she recalls. “On a professional level it was ‘brace yourself, this is going to be a lot’ and on a personal level it was ‘go home early and get your groceries.’ I think everyone remembers that afternoon, where everyone was trying to get the last pieces of vegetables in the supermarket, yet there was this eerie sort of brotherly atmosphere.”
At that point, Nijman says the emphasis quickly shifted to what the HR Division needed to tell people: What is the most important thing for people to know right now? How did UNHCR need to inform them? Questions ranged from whether colleagues would still get paid to whether they could leave a duty station with no medical provisions. Every aspect of HR was impacted at the same time, creating a crushing workload.
Initially, the Division was putting out a broadcast every few days, because the information kept updating so quickly. But there was also an urgent need to stay in constant contact with the Medical Section, both on the development of the pandemic itself and the psychosocial wellbeing of personnel.
“Even before the pandemic, I was already planning to use more videos, which the Division didn’t use before. So we put out a lot of videos, because we quickly realized they were received quite well — especially in a time of fear,” Nijman says. “The internal communications team also put out a lot of blogs to check in with colleagues around the world. We used a spectrum of tools to get the information out: weekly video updates on various aspects of COVID and things like the importance of contact tracing, infographics, the Internet — we did as much as we could possibly produce, and made sure the information was understandable to everyone.”
Fostering two-way communication and collaboration
No matter how much information the Division distributed, personnel wanted more. Questions came pouring in from everything about mask-wearing to vaccines, and Nijman turned to experts for accurate answers and relayed them to staff.
“We really wanted to maintain a dialogue, understanding that the feedback we were getting was coming from a place of anxiety — the pandemic is a giant space of worry,” she says. “People had anxiety about everything from working at home with children in the house to living in a place with no medical provisions.”
Nijman admits she was stressed and anxious, too. “It was a constant exercise in compartmentalizing,” she says. “Sometimes, communication is very emotional — and it’s not always received the way you intended to send it. I did not think when I took a job in HR communications that I’d be dealing with this massive undertaking I could not have imagined. It was a steep learning curve in communicating with people about questions that are rooted in anxiety.”
Accuracy is paramount in communications, but so is getting information out in a timely manner in an ever-evolving global pandemic, which has taken its toll.
“There was a time I was uploading information to the intranet at 22:30, with wet hair, wearing only a towel, because I’d been working 80, 90, 100 hours a week and only managed to eat and shower between tasks,” Nijman says. “Ironically, I was emailing a document about best practices and setting boundaries when working from home — doing the exact opposite of what I’d been writing.”
It’s been easier to set boundaries as things have calmed down a bit and vaccines are becoming more available, and for staff to embrace the message from UNHCR that personnel will be taken care of, whether they’re working from home or in a duty station.
Getting to this point has required a great deal of creativity and ingenuity, given an unprecedented situation. But the HR Division rose to the occasion, testing fresh ideas and novel approaches to work, in order to navigate a challenging time with an emphasis on the value of prioritizing people’s wellbeing. Of course, responding to the pandemic continues to require new and nimble responses, and there remains a certain level of anxiety among people across UNHCR.
Nijman says one of the most important lessons she’s learned is to “find your people.” In times of stress or overwork, it’s important to have colleagues you can talk things through with. “Even though it’s harder to connect with people sometimes, because they’re just so busy, it’s really important to maintain those connections,” she adds. “We’re all working together — we’re not doing anything alone.”
Watch for part two of this series for an inside look at how UNHCR’s Innovation Service has adapted to work and life during COVID.
