UNICEF

This project was my most extensive user research engagement—perhaps more accurately categorized as a human-centered design research project, as digital components were few. My survey of over 4,000 staff from 193 countries received a ~30% response rate. Leveraging survey results, I conducted over 100 interviews, workshops, and focus groups with participants across multiple time zones. I was responsible for designing and facilitating all research, as well as for the analysis of the complex and varied findings of staff experiences of the Mobility program.

 

Mobility is a policy and program that had gone somewhat dormant at UNICEF (as well as at other United Nations agencies), though it was still applicable to its approximately 4,000 International Professional (IP) staff. It follows a UN-wide guideline requiring IP staff to rotate duty stations, preferably moving to a different region of the world, every 2-5 years, depending on their Tour of Duty. For various reasons, the program was difficult to strictly follow, and could require serious sacrifices in career, personal life, and even well-being, as many duty stations are situated in emergency regions, where conflict or natural disaster has struck. Some IP staff at UNICEF take considerable risks for their work (and receive danger pay and other entitlements) while leaving families behind in relative safety, while others work in comfortable cosmopolitan cities. One goal of the Mobility policy was to ensure that the burden of the most personally challenging duty stations was not always carried by the same staff members.

 

Though the Human Resources team at UNICEF's headquarters in New York had facilitated the Mobility program for several years by the time they hired me as a human-centered design consultant in 2019, it had been challenging for them to be sure of what was going well for staff, and what was not, because of the far reach of this program and wide range of situations encountered by staff around the world. The HQ Human Resources team wanted to hear about these firsthand from staff members, rather than only through local HR reps. So this project was mainly an investigation, via quantitative and qualitative research, into IP staff's experiences and perceptions of the program, with the hopeful goal of improving communications, process, and policy so that the frequent disruptive job transitions—then required for staff to fulfill requirements of the Mobility policy—could go more smoothly.

 

This project helped me gain experience in conducting focus groups with a deliberative style of debate, requiring tact and diplomacy to manage the challenging and often sensitive subject matter and frictions that naturally arise over the course of discussions. It also helped me gain experience using systems thinking as an analysis tool (along with design thinking), as the optimal movement of so many staff in a complex way through such a large and diverse organization was undoubtedly a systems challenge.

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Note: there is no confidentiality policy for any of the materials I created, but as they are sensitive in nature, please delete any downloads after review.

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