UNHCR: How Viva Engage helps enable learning at UNHCR
EMEA | Viva Engage Festival 2023
The UNHCR team will share the story of how a focus on internal community engagement, powered by Viva Engage, plays a critical role in learning and career development for their global workforce.
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Right now, who I want to hear from is Amaria and Chimpele from UNHCR. So they've got a fantastic story, really cool story about how Viva Engage helps enable learning at UNHCR. It's a little more than just learning now, of course, which you'll hear about from Amaria and Chimpele.
But can I invite you both to join the conversation? Please come off mute and share your screen and fire away with your presentation. Of course, thank you so much, Pete, for inviting us. I'm very happy to be here together with my colleague, Chimpele, to tell you about how at UNHCR we have used Viva Engage to promote some of our internal events, global online events.
So I'm sharing my screen. I hope you can see it now. Yep, gotcha.
Great. OK, I can also see you, Pete, not the rest of the audience, but yeah, I'll just kick it in. So indeed, you can see here the titles of the events that we have organized over the last couple of years, Learn at UNHCR, Careers at UNHCR, another one focusing on well-being and Welcome at UNHCR.
And I still have the background as we had a recent onboarding event for our new hires. So. As I said, we made quite an extensive use of Viva Engage and I'm here not to share best practices, I'm not an expert, but maybe some of the promising practices that we have had because those really proved to be successful events with a lot of engagement by our workforce.
And we're also here to listen from you, to learn from you. And we hope that some of our activities could inspire you. Maybe you could pick up some of the few things that can work in your context and adapt them to your organization.
So before we deep dive into those global events and Viva Engage, I wanted to share a few words about UNHCR. So we are the UN refugee agency mandated to coordinate humanitarian action and protection for the forcibly displaced. So that's refugees on one side that have been forced to flee to another country to seek protection because of conflict, persecution, but also internally displaced population within their own countries and stateless people, people that do not have a nationality and that are indeed in need of international protection.
So we work in over 130 countries. We are truly global because it means that at least we have as many nationalities represented in our workforce with the local teams working all across the globe, about 19,000 people in total, the majority of which works in the in the field, as we say. So to very close to the point of delivery of our humanitarian programs, sometimes near border, in refugee camps, in very challenging circumstances where connectivity is not always great.
So the challenge has always been how do we effectively reach out to our people? How do we communicate with them in a way that is not only pushing out communications from HQ, as we used to do before, but engaging in meaningful two way communications? And as I said, Viva Engage, we have used it quite extensively over the past couple of years, and we found that it is really the corporate tool in UNHCR that enables not only two way, but multi way conversation because you start it from HQ or from anywhere else and somebody can add on it, contribute, and then, you know, the conversation has its own life. So this is really one of the tools that we love the most. And now I'm going to hand over to my colleague, Chimpele, who will give you an overview of our digital landscape.
All right. Can you hear me? Yes. OK.
All right. Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
Or good afternoon, evening, depending on where you're connecting from. My name is Chimpele and I work as an associate community officer. I'm based in Budapest, Hungary.
I guide colleagues on all internal engagement related matters as well as providing training, expertise and support. In UNHCR, we've got several internal platforms that we utilize that serve slightly different purposes. We've got the intranet.
We've got Microsoft Teams, EA Teams, we've got SharePoint, and we also have the star of today's show, which is Viva Engage. Viva Engage is used as a tool for organization wide engagement within UNHCR's digital ecosystem. And I have to say we love the platform.
One feature that one distinct feature that makes us really, really like Viva Engage is the fact that it's social. It's less formal, so as to say, unlike the other platforms. Someone sitting in a remote location or in the field, say in Uganda, can easily access it on the go and even on their mobile phone and be able to issue updates or check in just to see what's happening at the organization, find events like this festival.
They can also engage with senior leadership directly. In terms of governance, the platform is managed by our team, which sits in the Division of External Relations. We've got the editorial overview of the platform while the division of IT handles the technical side of the platform.
We do encourage open knowledge sharing, of course, respecting confidentiality and sensitive information norms within the organization. And apart from following the organization's code of conduct and ethical guidelines, Viva Engage has got its own set of netiquette, a code of conduct and a set of usage guidelines that are constantly updated and shared with all users. Lastly, I'll talk about the evolution trends.
So Viva Engage, or it was Yama then, has been used for more than 10 years in UNHCR. But it was during and after the COVID-19 pandemic that adoption really started to increase. Currently, we've got more than 200 communities, both public and private, serving different interests.
One of the most popular communities, though, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, was a community called Coping with COVID-19. This was created to maintain connections so that even though there were restrictions in as far as physical distances were concerned, colleagues didn't have to actually be socially distanced, at least not online. So colleagues used to share everything from policy or regulation updates.
And it was a two-way process. They used to share tips on new ways of working, get updates on news, and they used to share recipes. Some used to share short videos.
So it actually helped create a sense of community and a network of support. And with that, I think I'm going to have to pass the microphone back to you, Amaria, so we can dive deeper into the different case studies. Thank you, Chimpele.
So yes, indeed, since the pandemic, we have adopted new ways of working and also new ways of learning at UNHCR. So the Global Learning and Development Centre that I work with within the Division of Human Resources has piloted a new type of event that was in 2021, and we called it Learn at UNHCR. So it was based on the concept that exists in the UK.
I think it's an annual learning campaign in UK companies and in the public sector. So we adapted it to our context. And over a few days, we put together an agenda where colleagues could just, you know, jump in in a Teams meeting and listen to either an industry expert, a leader in the region, in HQ or a colleague somewhere share, you know, on topics of self-development and growth and how do we continuously learn at work.
So we launched the event, I mean, announced the event, on Viva Engaged, and it turned out to be a great success. We had about 7000 registrations. So we played with the concept.
And a few months later, we came up with the careers at UNHCR. This time to talk about career planning and career development. And that's where we hit the 25000 registrations mark.
So as I said, then we felt why not doing it about, you know, well-being in the lead up to the World Mental Health Day and our onboarding initiatives also to our new hires. So now we also run twice a year Welcome at UNHCR events. So all those events have the same objectives of promoting a culture of, you know, continuous learning, peer to peer learning and within, you know, the broader strategy of our internal communications at UNHCR, which is to inform our colleagues, to engage them and unite them under our mission and our mandate.
So just to give you now a sneak peek of what it looked like. Here you have some of the sessions in the agenda for the first Learn at UNHCR event, Delegate Don Dunk or we have here careers at UNHCR, one of the visuals and well-being at UNHCR that we held in October this year. I really liked, you know, the daily recaps that we would do on Viva Engage.
So we would share like soundbites and the one about burnout. I feel like reading out to you. So what does burnout feel like? It feels like as if my mind is an Internet browser with 17 types open, four of them are frozen and I don't know where the music is coming from.
So these are the this is just something that we heard during the day and we captured it so that we could amplify, you know, those messages through Viva Engage and encourage more colleagues to sign up for the next day. Now, maybe on the technical side of things, I wanted to give you another view of the ecosystem that we have used. So, of course, all the key information would be hosted on the Internet with the dedicated landing page.
Then we decided to also create dedicated SharePoint sites with all the, you know, the detailed agenda with the bio of the speakers, with the sign up system for colleagues to participate. And these were actually a Microsoft form and Power Automate to have it also automatically on your Outlook, on your agenda. Everything was hosted in MS Teams, just as, you know, our festival today.
And Viva Engage was one of the tools that we have used for internal promotion and, you know, engaging in multi-way conversations, as I was saying before. And it really proved to be a key part of the communication strategy for each one of these events before, during and after the events. So before, of course, to build the momentum, we had to start posting like engaging posts so that colleagues would save the date, you know, prepare themselves to participate.
But first of all, you have to ask yourself the question, do we need to create a new community or do we just, you know, leverage the existing ones? So for careers, we did create one because there was a gap. But as Chimpele says, we have like about 200 groups existing. So the point is really to be strategic and choose the community where you would host most of the posts related to this particular event and then identify those where you would, you know, share and, you know, continue, reach out to other, you know, to other groups in the organization.
So before, yes, indeed, we would run teasers. We would start with also running some challenges. And I will give you examples in the following slide.
During the event, so during the three, four days of the event, we do daily recaps. We spotlight some of the keynotes. We share our favorite soundbites, et cetera.
And after that, you know, the traditional key takeaways and also nice wrap up video to say thank you to all the speakers and the participants. So now some of the concrete activities that we have run on Viva Engage. So, you know, quizzes, polls, as Pete was saying before, asking a question is, you know, very powerful because this is what leads more replies.
But we also try to be creative and engage our colleagues in challenges for them to participate. So the first one for the career event was what makes a great day at work for you? So we were asking colleagues to share in the form of a video what is a great day for them, you know, working in the field. And we had very, very nice results coming from Iraq, from Panama, from Kenya.
And then we were able to post them and share them, you know, on the platform. We also come up with what inspires you to give your best at work for the following events. So this was actually a Padlet supported on the Internet.
So as I said, Viva Engage is just one element, you know, of our of our ecosystem. So it's there to promote, to leverage. But everything was not hosted on Viva Engage.
Obviously, our Internet works very well with Padlet because it can be embedded. So it's very nice. And that's how we ended up having like a sort of inspiration wall with colleagues sharing their pearls of wisdom of what, you know, inspires them to give their best at work.
Here, UNHCR people at work was a photo wall. This time we're asking people to upload photos on Padlet of them, you know, going to the field, meeting with partners or enjoying lunch with their teammates. So really something to inspire connections and increase the sense of belonging in the organization.
And last but not least, our people, our stories is a video series that we have launched just in May this year. But now we are publishing like one new episode per month. So these are colleagues that tell their unique career stories that share about, you know, how they started with UNHCR, what makes them stay with UNHCR, what makes them proud to work for the organization.
So it's a it's a very, very nice initiative that we have launched as, you know, side activities to those global events and that Viva Engage really helped amplify. So I think here I have an example for the engaging post that we made before the careers at UNHCR events. So we had this visual with some prompts where colleagues could, you know, participate and tell us what makes a great day at work for them so they could pick in the list and say, OK, this is when I support others, when I have a good laugh, when I feel trusted.
And then we would ask them to tag other colleagues. So this is, you know, what the challenge was about to share and tag other colleagues to keep the conversations going. Here you can see some of the polls and questions that we would ask.
And I think now I'm going to hand back to my colleague, Chimpele, to tell you about the future outlook of Viva Engage in UNHCR. All right. Thank you, Amaria.
We're going to finish our session by sharing our vision for the future. Firstly, it's worth noting that we are currently in the middle of a migration process. So the platform is being migrated into native mode.
And we actually plan to leverage the upcoming updates to enhance user experience and community management. I'm talking about features like Ask Me Anything events, Leadership Corner, Viva Answers, Advanced Analytics and also the possibility to host global events like town halls using the live events feature. Secondly, in collaboration with community managers, we plan to start developing and implementing targeted campaigns so that we drive participation and knowledge sharing on the platform.
And lastly, but not least, we also plan to expand the existing training programs to maximize Viva Engage utilization across all levels of the organization. This is going to include updating of all training and guidance materials, conducting webinars, having training sessions, as well as Q&A sessions to share the latest trends and updates, as well as to give community managers and community members the opportunity to ask questions or give feedback or even make suggestions. We strongly believe that technology or a tool or a platform is only as good as the people that are actually using it.
So at UNHCR, we make sure that all users are equipped with the right knowledge and skills so that they are comfortable enough to use all our tools effectively. And with this, I think we've come to the end of our session. Thank you.
Thank you so much. It's like I'm a massive fan of examples like this of learning and, you know, deeper engagement being powered by Viva Engage. We've got a few minutes for a couple of questions.
There's two questions in particular, one of them is my own. I'm being greedy here, but the first question I'll go to is how did you ensure the communications on your campaign were all joined up? Did you use hashtags? Did you restrict other more generic posts during the campaign? How did you, I guess it's sort of like saying, how did you help that campaign really make an impact? Yeah, we started using hashtag, but yeah, it's true that at UNHCR, many, I mean, such as in your organisation, a lot of things, you know, happen at the same time and time is of the essence. So we try to avoid, you know, speaking too early.
So basically four weeks is a good starting point. But then it's really the last week that we increase our engagement on the platform and we start to post. So we try to be strategic in the communities where we post to, you know, for example, if we have a women and change group at UNHCR, so there we would post anything that could be of concern to them.
We would really try to select and be strategic, not to overwhelm or, you know, overburden the bandwidth of our colleagues. But technically hashtags, I've seen some colleagues using them. I'm not sure it has, we have used it to its full potential yet.
And when we do post on the all company channel there, we always coordinate. We know with Chimpele, because that's the one that everybody would get. And we also want to be quite conservative.
So I personally post only once or maximum twice on the all company channel for our global online events, because, of course, they are great. We want colleagues to to participate, but we are conscious that a lot of other things are happening. So there I'm always, you know, relying on Chimpele's advice about when to post, when, you know, he knows who else is planning to use that big channel.
So, yeah, that's the use that we've had so far. And from your response there, one thing that sort of jumped into my mind is like respecting your audience, right? Like not, you've got to think of your audience. That's what I'm hearing from you is like you're aware they've got so much going on.
Your thing might be a big deal to you, but to them it's one of 50 things. You don't want to be spamming them and actually overdoing it to potentially drive them away. So that's I think that's a really important message that you're sharing there.
So in the time we've got, I'm going to ask one more question, which is my question, just because that slide you had with before, during, after you've you talking that around lots of activity and, you know, then then you've shared examples of like videos being shared and images and graphics, all this sort of stuff. I look at that and I go, well, you know, you must have a big budget to do all of this. So how much money, your response is kind of tell how much how much budget did you have for all of that activity? Not at all.
I mean, actually, it's just staffing resources. So, of course, my time has a financial impact, but we don't have a budget to run those events, actually, even when we reach out, you know, to to people, to speakers, you know, we ask them to do it on a pro bono basis. But we do work all together.
So we create like agile teams because it's it's a thing that comes on top of your regular work and we have different work streams. So, of course, in the communications work stream, I'm there. It's part of my job that I work with other colleagues, you know, from other functional areas to brainstorm and come up with those creative ideas.
So it's, you know, it's time consuming for the first one. I think we started the five months before the event. It's really the setting the agenda and locking everyone, you know, locking up all the slots in their schedules.
That takes the most of time. But then it's just, you know, being analytical, preparing things over time and strategic about when to start posting and communicating. So it's in terms of budget.
Yeah, it's really just our own time. Chimpele? Yeah, if I may just add on top of that, in terms of the actual content creation, we do have a standalone design and video unit, which we tap into time and again, depending on the need, even though they're quite overwhelmed all the time, but they also come in handy. So that also helps.
Yeah, what helps is that we have very clear branding guidelines. So, you know, today you can open Canva and create a nice design. And, you know, we have access to our photo library and things like that.
So we can, you know, create things ourselves. And because it's on Yammer, you know, there's less, you know, control. Of course, it's not like posting to the outside world where, you know, Chimpele's colleagues in the external relations division would come and review everything.
And so, no, we can play a bit and enjoy some more freedom. Yeah, brilliant. I think that's a really nice, nice note to end on is the mention of play and having some fun with it, because ultimately it seems like this is a great case study in trying something and learning from it and then expanding the impact of it.
So you started off with that pilot in the learning space and then you've moved it into these other areas and. Yeah, sorry, you go. No, no, I just wanted to say I'd be super happy to, you know, answer any questions from, you know, people from your audience.
Meet the speakers:
Amaria Belaskri
Head of Client Engagement
UNHCR
Chimpele Kelvin Tsamwa
Associate Community Officer
UNHCR
