Some of the management challenges facing the UN Secretariat include: 

 

1) Inadequate financial support from member states i.e. budget constraints, long standing dues from assessed contributions. For this reason, in recent years the UN have had to limit programs. Namely, The United States cut, in 2011, all his extra budgetary contribution ($3.7m yearly) to UNESCO, as a retaliation for having admitted Palestine[2] leading to massive layoffs which were conductive to unfinished programes.

2) Inadequate physical (logistics, communications technology and infrastructure) and human resources. The UN Secretariat, though initially conceived as a conference service staff for its Member States (translation and interpretation, materials distribution etc), it has evolved into a program delivery body, therefore its regulations must evolve accordingly, as it is not the same to secretariat for a few hundred thousand meetings a year than monitor and spend $63bn annually (Oil-for-Food programme).

A unique position to problem solve and drive change in the world. Reform management is a must for the UN if it wants to succeed and use that position to create meaningful change and avoid WWIII.

A management problem that I have identified that requires action is the issue of staff recruitment (regulated under ST/SGB/2014/1 of 1 January 2014) to the UN. The UN, as established in its charter requires (article 101) the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity for its  staff. There is 40,000 staff and 102,000 troops[3]under the command of the UN Secretary-General, deployed in five duty stations (New York, Geneva, Vienna, Santiago, and Nairobi) and 16 Peacekeeping Operations[4], scattered across the world, where frequently offices in a single country are separated by 800 kilometers and staff and troops need to be deployed in hazardous conditions, i.e. landlocked countries or simply lack of roads due to the ongoing wars. However, managers do not have it easy to deliver: on average it takes 213 days to recruit new staff. Recently the UN instituted a new system of recruitment that may extend that to over 365 days. 

As stated by the Boards of Auditors (A/71/5 (Vol. I), “it is vital that the United Nations make best use of its key resource, its workforce. It has, however, made limited progress against the Board’s previous concerns about the lack of strategic workforce planning. Key human resources performance indicators are not being achieved, and management continues to be hampered by a lack of accurate, timely and reliable information” and ¨161. Effective workforce management plays a critical role in an organization’s ability to achieve its objectives. In addition to delivering the right skills for the right job at the right time, organizations should provide opportunities for staff members to learn and develop skills as their careers progress and organizational priorities change, and manage and incentivize staff performance. Organizations also need to be able to deploy staff flexibly and measure how effectively staff are utilized” Therefore, in light of the above, the purpose of this research is to determine how the UN can improve its recruitment processes to better save the world.

[1] http://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/un-charter-full-text/[2] https://unesco.usmission.gov/mission/contributions1.html[3]http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/documents/Yearly.pdf[4]http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/current.shtml

[1] http://www.un.org/ga/acabq/[2] http://www.un.org/en/auditors/board/[3] http://www.un.org/en/ga/fifth/[4]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/opinion/sunday/i-love-the-un-but-it-is-failing.html?_r=0

I will record the data by taking notes during the Skype call.

I plan to analyze the data by reading over the notes from the interviews and summarizing the issues raised in the answers of the participants. Once I have conducted all of the interviews, it will be easier to compare the answers of the different participants and determine the common themes and issues raised by the participants.

Inefficiencies in the hiring process cost the respondents department $784,510.47 in 2015. This figure is comprised of: underperforming staff, non-recruited staff, IT and Office and overtime costs.

As international civil servants, UN staff have a unique statute. They have numerous guarantees and thus, to prohibit biases managers, they cannot be laying off until the end of their assignment and those on permanent contracts (the great majority) are guaranteed another appointment  – we can see the inefficiency of this policy in the value of the salaries of underperformers in the department, which were $278,077.92. 

The respondent’s department has 3 HR staff to deal with recruiting for a staffing table of 70, with salaries of approximately $300,000. This is the closest available figure that gave a monetary value of recruiting in the UN. 

Non-recruited staff costs were $463,463.20. These are salaries contributed by member states for posts that couldn’t be filled due to inefficient hiring practices.

Overtime costs, to make for the underperforers could be estimated at  $9,600. These are additional costs , despite non recruited salaries costing $463,463.20. If the respondents department had all the necessary posts filled – this cost wouldn’t have been incurred.

Temporary promotions (Special Post Allowances) are only approved for a three month period – there is no consistency or motivation for the staff to apply for temporary positions because there is no job security associated with them. There is therefore no internal promotion system, which leads to UN staff expending about a 30% (it is said in the UN hallways) of their times in applying for higher posts.

In my respondent’s department, there are currently 10 unfilled positions due to the inefficient hiring processes. Six are over six months, one over a year.

 

The cost / benefit analysis was impossible to carry out due to the lack of any meaningful data, or any practical way to ascertain said data. This inability to obtain data hindered my quantitative research proposal.

 

Second phase is yet to be completed to due lack of availability from the interviewees – but will be completed during December 2016.

Conclusion: Inefficient and bureaucratic HR rules are preventing UN from delivering their mandate. 

Conclusion: UN isn’t focused on financial results or profitability. UN measures its success by the competency of staff and their ability to deliver their mandate of developing better policy and programs.

Recommendation: While accountability it's a must when using tax payers money, UN Managers should be afforded more flexibility if they are to met their mandare.

Recommendation: That the UN implement faster hiring processes to become more efficient. This could be done by giving managers more autonomy over who they hire. Additionally, overtime is a further expense that wouldn’t have to be incurred if the organization had the correct amount of staff in posts.

Recommendation: Staff budgets are aligned with realistic mandates. This would help to enhance job stability and satisfaction at the organization, would help to reduce staff turnover.

Cost of turnover; how much it costs to train and recruit new employees; productivity levels with new employees during training and the cost of this for the organization and other employees; finally I will look at why people are leaving – and perhaps provide costings for training, induction, improving recruitment processes, internal communication and culture and indicate how relevant improvements may cost less than continuing with an extremely low turnover.

I think that these will help me to answer my research objectives because they cover the scope of what I am looking to find out.

The respondent for this phase will be an employee at the United Nations. 

For my quantitative phase, I am going to complete a Cost Benefit Analysis. This may be the only effective method of completing quantitative research.

This this phase of the research will be conducted online. This because it’s the quickest way to produce information in this scenario.

Any data ascertained will be recorded on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. 

What I planned didn’t work exactly. The cost benefit analysis couldn’t be completed in a conventional manner due to the special / unique organization that is the UN. My respondent informed me that the UN doesn’t measure efficiencies in monetary terms, but rather in terms of how inefficiencies affect their ability to implement their mandate – which is to develop policies and programs to deal with issues across the world – in other terms, the benefits are intangible and monetary values can’t be attached.

The respondent however was able to provide me with relevant data about cumulative salaries of underperforming employees, cumulative salaries for non-recruited employees, number of rotations of employees, IT and office space and overtime costs – which give an insight into efficiencies at the UN overall. 

The data was recorded by inputting it into an Excel spreadsheet.

·         How can the UN improve its recruitment processes?

Then let the other issues emerge in your research.

Then  I suggest you state your specific research sub-objectives as:

·         What are the current UN recruitment procedures?

·         What are the issues in the recruitment process? 

·         How can the UN improve the process?

·         Evaluate the costs and benefits of improving the process   ????

Let these issues emerge in your qualitative interviews (you will need to do more than one)

‘Other questions that I considered when determining my research were: How to make recruitment faster? Does the UN not maximize its unique position to be a driver of change because it doesn’t have the necessary talent readily available? Does the UN waste funds because of the laborious hiring process? How could the UN make the process more accessible?’

 

How are you going to do your quantitative research?  I don’t think a survey is feasible – would you consider doing a cost-benefit analysis and assign monetary values to the ‘costs’ of the current system and the ‘benefits’ and ‘costs’ of what you propose as improvements?

 

Another facet you could consider is current govt. Recruitment policy as it has similar time and bureaucratic tendencies.