Humanitarian agencies have a responsibility to create an organizational culture and policies, values, practices, and management approaches that support humanitarian workers both at headquarters and in the field. The failure to provide effective, comprehensive support carries a high price in lost productivity, attrition, health problems, destructive conflict, burnout, and ineffective programming. This is particularly true in the new humanitarian context, which demands that organizations negotiate an increasingly dangerous security environment and complex ethical issues associated with the blurring of humanitarian and military operations.
At present, most humanitarian organizations are struggling to develop more comprehensive approaches to supporting humanitarian workers. The emphasis in many agencies is on supporting individuals through processes such as post-assignment support and debriefing following extraordinary events. However, the greatest stresses on humanitarian workers often result not from critical incidents but from excessively hierarchical management styles, daily indignities, lack of full participation by national staff, and organizational policies and practices. A much wider array of organizational supports is needed in areas such as hiring, security, training, staff development, participatory decision-making, response to critical incidents, and conflict management. Support to humanitarian workers cannot be an afterthought or a one-time response to extraordinary events—it needs to be woven into the fabric of the organizational vision and life.
Humanitarian organizations have significant leadership, management, and staff development choices to make in regard to these and related issues. There is considerable need for organizations to learn from each other in addressing the issues and developing more comprehensive supports. The resources on this page, offered in a spirit of collective learning, illustrate a range of steps that humanitarian organizations have taken to develop more comprehensive approaches. Familiarity with these practices can help make you a more effective manager, though they are not final answers since the situation and the issues are always evolving.
Online resources
Standards, codes of conduct, and other guidelines and benchmarks
Managing stress in staff of humanitarian aid organizations is an essential ingredient in enabling the organization to fulfill its field objectives, as well as a necessary one to protect the well-being of the individual staff members themselves.
The People In Aid "Code of Good Practice in the management and support of aid personnel" is a tool to help agencies offer better development aid and disaster relief to communities in need, and is an important part of their efforts to improve standards, accountability and transparency amid the challenges of disaster, conflict and poverty. The People In Aid Code offers agencies the best framework for effective human resources management, helping them assess and raise their performance. The code is available online as well as in PDF format in several languages.
This manual (available in four PDFs) is targeted towards field-level aid agency managers responsible for security of staff and assets, and offers a systematic step-by-step approach to security management. It reviews major threats, measures to try and prevent them, and guidelines on how to survive and manage an incident if it occurs. A number of crosscutting themes are explored that are relevant to risk control such as personal and team competency, clarity towards national staff, good communications, cultural issues, briefing and training, etc.
The Handbook is intended as a managers' guide to setting up emergency operations for large-scale influxes and provides advice in a nontechnical manner on how to tackle various aspects of emergency response.
The immediacy of disaster relief can often lead NGOs unwittingly to put pressure on themselves—pressure which leads to short-sighted and inappropriate work. Six of the world's oldest and largest networks of NGOs came together in 1994 with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement to draw up a professional Code of Conduct to set, for the first time, universal basic standards to govern the way they should work in disaster assistance.
The Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) strives to make humanitarian action accountable to its intended beneficiaries: those people whose lives are at risk due to armed conflict or other calamitous events. Organizations can judge their conduct against the standard's six benchmarks. Also of interest are the HAP's "Principles of Accountability". The members of HAP seek to comply with these principles through self-regulation and accreditation. They also share a vision of a humanitarian system at large that upholds these ideals.
InterAction's PVO Standards promote an ethical code of conduct in many areas, including section 6.0 about "Management Practice and Human Resources." Intended to ensure and strengthen public confidence in the integrity, quality, and effectiveness of member organizations and their programs, the standards were created when the overseas work of PVOs was dramatically increasing in scope and significance.
In an international initiative aimed at improving the effectiveness and accountability of disaster response, the Sphere Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response sets out for the first time what people affected by disasters have a right to expect from humanitarian assistance. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of assistance provided to people affected by disasters, and to enhance the accountability of the humanitarian system in disaster response. The Handbook is available in over 20 languages.
This article examines the risks of aid work that stretch from terrorism to those less obvious but more common: stress, overwork and burnout, through to disease, accidents, and even loneliness or depression while tackling a crisis a long way from home. Rising pressures on staff have prompted a growing number of aid agencies to share information, set standards and take practical steps to ensure that the training, support and management they offer will keep workers safe so they can deliver the best results.
The author of this article, Claire Colliard, is founder and executive director of the Center for Humanitarian Psychology, a Geneva-based NGO offering psychological support to humanitarian staff. As a former clinical psychologist, she argues that agencies have the responsibility to do what they can to prevent staff being overwhelmed by stress and overwork, through providing good access to information and communications channels.
This 2000 report describes the findings and recommendations resulting from an investigation into the support and management provided to workers in relief and development. Methods included a survey of 200 returned workers and discussions with employing agencies.
Humanitarian emergencies today expose individuals and organizations to new dilemmas and new challenges. Staff turnover is high and burnout is common. This article from 2000 offers suggestion for development of a stable and experienced workforce whose energies are effectively harnessed through more enlightened organizational policies. When seen in this light, the psychological support of relief workers is simply part of the employer's duty and responsibility—it is not an optional extra.
A report prepared for the "Resources for Humanitarian Assistance" Project of the Center on International Cooperation, New York University, The Praxis Group, Ltd., December 1998.
Do you know of a good resource for this page? Please contact us. Thanks for helping us to improve this website.
