UNWIND

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COMPETITION

Once upon a time, I ran alone and thought that I was a good runner, like world class. However, when I entered the world of competitive running, then only did I learn what a backward and slow runner I was.

THE OFFICE MOVE

When I was working at UNICEF New York, the office moved staff four times in a 20-year period. In the field, I also experienced several moves. Moving office is a stressful act. However, some preparation and discussion can reduce that stress.

EXTRA WORK FOR NOTHING

UN/UN agency staff does extra work for no reason whatsoever. Departments render seams of analysis in anticipation that senior management will require the information. In the same way, senior management demand explanations and analysis that the Executive Board members and donors may require. The result is information overload and too much of unnecessary work to produce it.

WRITING JUSTIFICATIONS

When you write a justification, also look for the opposition.

TO UNLEASH HIDDEN IDEAS WHAT MUST WE DO?

STORM THE BRAIN!

Research confirms that people do better if they brainstorm alone rather than in groups. Individuals in the group may sometimes hijack the topic to impress the boss or bosses present with a failed session. On the other hand, a brainstorming session may get a bad name if the boss organized it to gain support for his or her idea while discouraging truth-telling. These findings report in the Wall Street Journal of June 13, 2006 (Brainstorming Works Best If People Scramble for Ideas on their Own).

ETHICS AS A WAY OF LIFE IN THE UN - REALITY OR DREAMING?

UN Staffers subject to new ethical guidelines is about how the U.N. Secretariat, which faces ongoing charges of mismanagement and corruption, will provide advice and guidance to staff members on ethics and public morality.

To get this process going the UN has newly established an Ethics Office and is now publicly calling for candidates to fill the position of Director of Ethics at the D2 level and three professional officers.   The functions of the Ethics Office include administration of the UN’s policies of Financial Disclosure and protection for reporting misconduct.  Qualified candidates may apply on-line at http://jobs.un.org under the category Administration by June 30, 2006.  Women are particularly encouraged to apply. However, the big question is whether ethics can be a way of life in the UN system.

WELCOME TO THE DANCE - CORRUPTION SCENES

Remember, our childhood warning that it takes a single “bad apple” for the corruption torture to reverberate on our heads. Moreover, why do people continue to work for such organizations, like the UN and World Bank, for example? I am a UN retiree, and thought that I would be exempt of all shame when anything negative comes on in the media about the UN guilty of corruption. I am ex UN so my non-UN friends still regard me as a product of a corrupt organization. Well, I have had to remind them repeatedly, that it just takes one bad apple to smog the entire organization.

You well know that there have been a number of corporate scandals in corporate America. Does that mean that all American corporations are corrupt? Forget it. Similarly, not all of the UN is corrupt. If a few members of an organization have been corrupt, that should not reverberate to the whole organization.

The UN has a code of conduct for its staff members, which is a formalized form of enforcement. While the definition of professionalism is intellectual skill and competence, honesty has to come from the character of the person. The UN should do all it can to find the underlying cause of all accusations relating to oil-for food, shredded files, sexual misconduct and protect whistle blowers in this completely scandalous period.

All of the UN must preach the gospel of honesty to its colleagues. Particularly the UN is very vulnerable if there is any bit of dishonesty. UN staff spend public money in the course of their official UN business, not your own or not that the organization has earned, but donor money. Therefore, honesty and integrity is paramount. The UN and its agencies will do well to strengthen and expand the internal audit service and have more external audits done out in program service development rather than emphasizing too much on the small pie of management and administration budgets.  Too much emphasis is placed on operations to manage operations, leaving the program out of the loop resulting in many a mission impossible.

TIPS FOR PRE-RETIREMENT PROGRAM

AN OPINION

There is a popular belief that folks lose interest in their current jobs as they near retirement and choose to hop off the career ladder and take on jobs more projects oriented. In other words, greater operational excellence achieves by replacing them before retirement and then assigning them to special projects. The main stimulus is that some may wish to be away from work for a while to try other careers or interests in moving into retirement.

It would be unwelcome to suggest anything that costs extra dollars. A self-financing program that is not a cost burden on the budget may be more acceptable. If staffs are willing to go on no-pay leave for half the time, then the savings from that half-time off uses to reemploy then for the other half time. The only issue left now is the pension fund contribution. Since the pension bases on the last 36-months of remuneration, you will need to find out from the UN Pension Fund whether the pension reduces if they contribute less in these last few years, unless the pension calculates on the full annual salary regardless of the contribution. The next is how to finance the organization’s PF contribution for these off-pay period, perhaps this is an expense that the organization may wish to bear as its contribution to the program and the staff member pays for his or her contribution. However, all these restrictions can be over come if staff can retire early and continue to work while getting a pension. In that case, a self-funding program will not be an issue.

To make some changes, both the UN management and UN retirees must culturally adapt from some Stone Age procedures. In the UN culture, the last grade of employ always relates to post-retirement status and consultancy pay. In other words, if you retire as a P5, you always hire as a P5 no matter what the assignment is. Of course, HRM tries to hire P5’s for P5 work, but often times, connections or collegiality can break that rule. The UN management culture has to change too in not asking a P5 to do a D2 job and then paying him or her P5 salary. A job must be paid for its worth.

One other silly procedure is to stop a retiree from working when payouts equal the salary equivalent of a NY based GS-2 for two months. If there is work to do, pay the person and collect contributions to the pension fund, but do not stop his/her pension. With bureaucracy that prevails the organization stops the retiree from working and hires an outsider who knows 25% as much and the project suffers. On the other hand, sometimes the UN administration pays the retiree a per diem pay to get around the silly bureaucracy. Conversely, if the retiree works for another institution, then he/she collects his/her pension and is paid by that other organization. So why not apply that same commonsense, when they reemploy with the UN. Of course, the bureaucrats would say that if retirees collect pension and pay that they might abuse the system. Rules are always made for a small percentage of abusers while the greater majority may not abuse it.

We need a social upheaval to change the seniority and procedural traps in employing the UN Past Masters.

IMPROVING PROCESSES

          When you compare the speed and efficiency by which processes take place in the private sector it would rather make a UN agency (worse still the UN) seem to be standing still. Putting it another way: If you compare the process times of the UN and its allied agencies with those of the private sector in most industrialized countries it would make all of the UN look like the most inefficient entities in the world.  Why is this so?

          Business leaders drive by the profit motive, UN agency leaders drive by the social motive.  This main difference creates a host of other factors that combine to produce an environment in which UN agency staff view risks and rewards very differently than the private sector employee. The UN agency is democratic and open; thus, it moves more slowly than a business entity, whose business managers can make quick decisions behind closed doors.  UNICEF’s fundamental mission is to do good to the children and women of the developing countries (through its respective host governments) and not to make money like a business.  One can conclude that an UN agency is a second government that is supporting the primary government in a developing country.  Thus, we cannot speak of UNICEF in the absence of not speaking of a government.  Governments must serve everyone equally; hence, it cannot achieve the same market efficiencies as business.  So is this an excuse for UNICEF or any UN agency to have a slower process turnover than a well-run private sector company?

          UNICEF or other UN agency has marbled a UN bureaucracy embedded in the way most of the UN operates.  The current quantum of rules and regulations plus policies in the UN system has grown over time to beyond redemption with much complexity and confusion and wasting much staff time. The UN would require a panel of experts to review this bulge and rewrite simpler, straightforward and fewer rules. It is that some staff are working at half-speed due to lack of motivation or barely working at all, as they wade through rules and regulations. It is people working at tasks that do not add value to a process.  Moreover, it is people following regulations that must not have been written in the first place or filling out forms that should never have been printed. Waste in the UN is staggering because of the bureaucracy bulge.  The UN and its agencies are monopolies, thus, there is no competition to force it to be more effective. It is good to adopt the ideology of first class companies, that the next process is the customer.  Thus, inefficiency complaints can come not only from within individual staffers, audit, and work teams, ACABQ or Executive Boards.

          The UNICEF philosophy must change from serving the best group of people (poor women and children of developing countries) to adding value to that group.  Aim to getting the right processes to produce the best results in the shortest possible time and at minimum cost is the ideal target.  Workflow is thus the key to achieving success in process improvement.  Thus, workflow must continuously challenge the ongoing operation, often called kaizen, from great successes of Japanese companies.  That means, creating an atmosphere of continuous improvement and continuous learning that embraces change on a continuous basis, not a once in a few years occasion. Processes must flow smoothly like a good plumbing system without clogging (interruption) that block the flow of information and action. Successful process flow means that work processes are redesigned to achieve higher value-added, thus aiming to minimize the amount of time that any work is sitting idle or waiting for someone to work on it.  The various bottlenecks that cause delays in this process chain needs examination, whether they are derelict rules, useless processes, or necessary processes that just take too long when benchmarked with other organizations. Without benchmarking an UN agency will not know whether it is among the best, above or below average.

          We can conclude that an UN agency such as UNICEF cannot run like a business. Nevertheless, many similarities from business pose no excuse for slowness in the UN agency.  Pick any process, from recruitment to purchasing, accounting and administration or program delivery and you will see that these processes do exist in business too, and that benchmarking their speeds with business would put the UN to horrific shame.  Just because a nonprofit cannot run like, a business does not mean it cannot become more entrepreneurial. For instance, UNICEF’s Annual Report of 2004 mentions that UNICEF procured education materials valued at $71 million and distributed 11,000 school-in-a-box kits and 8,200 replenishment kits to 32 countries.  What was the demand quantity and did supply meet demand?  What was the shortfall and was it due to lack of funds or slow processes? An efficiency question then is what were the lead times for these supply chains from order initiation to final user and how does that benchmark with the private sector.  How much of these supplies reached the end user and how much was yet sitting in government warehouses as of 31 December 2004?  All we are looking at is the time-line from the moment that a supply-call-forward (SCF) or cash-call-forward (CCF) issues to the point when the goods (or services) reach the end-user.  Reducing or removing the non-value-added wastes that delay smooth flow is the key for a successful process design. We always hear glorifying reports of new computer systems with no mention of how it helped improve lead times in administrative and program processes.  Better information from a business standpoint, complex and expensive systems that do not improve lead-time is a joke.

          UNICEF processes from meetings to making decisions and translating decisions into action can benchmark with previous years, similar UN agencies and business.  Some mandatory processes in the UN needs challenging at Executive Board level and must change.  Part of the problem has been the zeal of the Executive Boards, exercising a constant impulse to control – to dictate how much the administration spend on every item in the budget or overhead component (management, administration and program support), so that donor money is not wasted on the non-program component of expenditures.  The focus to reduce expenditure needs change of direction, by focusing on improving process times in both administration and program areas. From the country program planning cycle to the task of getting goods from the shippers tackle into government warehouses and out of those warehouses to the poor beneficiaries (final customers) is an important operation. Equally important is ensuring that liquid cash given to government transforms quickly to a service for the poor is also a more important operation than the processes in the traditional non-program areas of UNICEF. UNICEF cash sitting still in government coffers is not program implementation. Thus there is a need to improve the operations of all areas of UNICEF, be it program or otherwise.

          Program delivery must utilize when completed. From Jeffrey Sach’s – End of Poverty we learn how donors have helped to build clinics, but then rejected the plea to cover the salaries of doctors and nurses to staff the clinics.  The predicting results are the construction of empty shells rather than operating health facilities.  UNICEF has had similar examples in the past, where schools built and lay idle as empty shells as the governments could not fund the ancillary staff or teachers to run the schools or health clinics supply with equipment without training in its use. On the other hand, the overproduction of hand pumps with vast stocks rusty and beyond use but yet the supplies keep coming. What is the point of improving processes if assets lay idle and unutilized, underutilized, or over produced.  The slogan to process improvement is the ‘Effective Utilization of Resources’ whether it is “idle cash” or cash transformed to finished supplies or services .Useless meetings that produce no results or unutilized or underutilized staff or equipment are not effective utilization of resources and are brakes in a process system.

          Improving operations means taking action.  The most successful organization in the world, Toyota, places the highest value on implementation and taking action.  Try to do something is the Toyota philosophy.  Toyota’s president insists that taking action and doing something makes us realize our own failures so we do it better at the second trial and continuous challenge creates a climate of continuous improvement that leads to a higher level of practice and knowledge. UNICEF workshops should focus more on how to improve response times and less on how to learn new procedures. Just dabbling at the process level will not help improve process times in any UN agency.  Nevertheless, great results can achieve by making a start and taking action to eliminate wasted time and resources, build quality into workplace systems, finding alternatives to expensive technology and most important involving top management to build a culture of continuous improvement.  Establishing Continuous Improvement or Kaizen Work Teams may help in enforcing a culture of continuous improvement.  To change for the better, UNICEF need to shorten lead times by eliminating waste in each step of a process, which leads to better quality and lower cost while improving morale as each person is challenged to be better.

UN REORGANIZATION

Change is inevitable for the United Nations since its establishment almost 60 years ago.  While its program priorities have shifted, perhaps its management, administration, and bureaucracy at large has taken a back seat.  One of the other problems with bigness is that the UN has grown, not only at the secretariat base but also with the addition of agencies over time.  The time has come to examine the duplication or triplication of efforts between the different agencies and the UN secretariat itself.

A Wall Street article on ‘Reform, U.N. Style’, (Review & Outlook, December 6, 2005) pointed out the example of the duplicity of AIDS issues stemming from INSTRAW (U.N. International Research and Training for the Advancement of Women) with that between the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS. In addition, of course, UNICEF does social work that specifically targets women and children of the developing world. UNICEF also researches and programs AIDS issues questioning further the legitimacy of INSTRAW.

If you mention education for instance, much more than one UN agency will speak of it and program it.  Similarly, if you speak of water and sanitation or the reduction of poverty, there will be more than one than one UN agency doing work in those areas.  Due to this reason, sometimes third world country governments are confused to hear so much of the same thing from different UN agencies. 

However, while duplication should be avoided at all cost, coordination may not be misunderstood for duplication. For instance, UNAIDS is not an agency competing or duplicating work but is a coordinating body. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) is a secretariat bringing together efforts and resources of UN system organizations to the global AIDS response.  The co-sponsors of UNAIDS are UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP, UNFPA, ILO, UNESCO, WHO and the World Bank.(see Footnote 1).

Nevertheless, in some respects the UN has been functioning as if the rest of the world has been standing still.  Coming out of the developing countries are knowledge bases of highly skilled professionalism and intellectualism. Private companies have relocated much of their labor-intensive operations to inexpensive low-wage localities outside major metropolises and in the developing world.  It will be thus difficult for the UN to defend its heavy high cost headquarter structures in the most capital cities of the industrialized world.  In addition, digital telecommunication technology has reached such an advanced stage that geographic distance should not prevent the execution of some tasks that hitherto required close personal contact.  For instance, procurement need not initiate from central locales in the industrialized world.  Placing procurement centers closer to the action may be the most desirable management decision to consider. As a case example, the Toyota Motor Corporation decided to open manufacturing plants in the USA because it was much faster and cheaper to deliver a Toyota automobile to a US customer than ship it all the way from Japan.

The entry point of staff selection deserves high priority so that some staff appointments base on well-honed ability rather than political influence. The classification of staff into general service (GS) and international professional (IP) should be combined into one grade structure through more levels, e.g. from 1 to 17, so that lower level staff do not feel demoralized and tainted with low levels of esteem. The maximum retirement age of 62 years-old should apply to all grades of staff without exception.  It is discriminatory to allow staff at the senior levels of assistant secretary-general and beyond to work past the retirement age enforced on lower level staff.

The functions that must get the highest recognition and upgrading in the UN systems are that of Information Technology (IT) and Human Resource Management (HRM).   Technology has transformed business with boundless potential.  Technology is changing every day and offering newer and better opportunities to enhance communication, information sharing and decision-making.  The UN needs a highly skilled technology group to advance its operations and without the right incentives, it would be difficult to attract and retain good people in this field.

Not of lesser importance is the function of HRM. The UN and its agencies have no factories and need none either.  What it needs is the ideas from its people to solve the difficult problems of the developing world.  Upgrading the HRM function to serve beyond personnel administration should be the next best course of action.  HRM directors should post at ASG level in UN agencies as large as UNICEF and report directly to the head of that UN agency.  With today’s knowledge-economy, harnessing employee intellect to narrow the efficiency gaps in the UN is a critical ingredient of UN reform.  Much more enhancements in the UN leadership development, staff motivation, staff training, and recruitment and appraisal systems are long overdue. Hitherto, HRM officers focus more on recruitment, routine personnel administration and firing of staff rather than given a free hand to mobilize the resources of the organization and update HRM practices to infuse innovation in the UN workplace. 

The structure of executive boards and the frequency of board meetings seem overbearing on UN agencies. With one executive board meeting each year, a UN agency had more time to spend on doing real work.  However, with a change to hold four executive meetings a year, UN agencies embraced this added burden with much strain to its existing operations.  Perhaps, it may be appropriate to examine the experiment of more frequent board meetings over the past few years.

Outdated UN regulations are not a good base to start UN reform. Rewriting UN rules and regulations from a clean slate may provide better accountability and minimize bureaucracy. The UN is in need of a big dose of unbureaucratic management principles.

Finally, UN harmonization is another issue that needs close examination.  With too much harmonization UN, agencies seem restricted to evolve and change with the fast changing circumstances of its program environment.  The quest for greater harmonization may lead to unhealthy needs for enforced conformity.  UN agencies must be left free to adapt and change to their own growth and program needs without channeling through a big monolithic process of harmonization.  What needs harmonization in the UN is salary and grade scales and accounting and administrative procedures, and much of that exists already.  Furthermore, the harmonization process has brought on more meetings and more delays in addition to the already hopeless turnaround times that make the UN infamous.

This short essay in no doubt covers all areas of UN Reform - a big subject of discussion and action. However, the UN and its agencies cannot stop working for UN reform, the work must go on. Rather than one mammoth overhaul, UN reform must be a continuous process.  It is therefore incumbent on the reformers to have a  plan that phases reform over a term of years in some priority order and make adjustments to that plan as experience is gained with the reform process.

Footnotes:

UNAIDS = Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS.

UNHCR = United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

UNICEF = United Nations Children's Fund

WFP = World Food Program

UNDP = United Nations Development Program

UNFPA = United Nations Population Fund

ILO = International Labor Organization

UNESCO = United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

WHO = World Health Organization