Values in Action: Trust, Resilience and Innovation

Team Assessment tool helps consolidate organisational core values

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is a global organization dedicated to providing life-saving assistance for people forced to flee conflict and persecution.

The UNHCR Sub-Office Hong Kong was established in 1979 and promotes the cause of persons of concern in HKSAR and focuses on three key areas of Protection, Comprehensive Solutions and Private Sector Partnerships.

UNHCR Hong Kong wanted to bring the team together and reflect on some organisation core values that are included in their code of conduct: trust, resilience and innovation. They wish to go through experiential learning to practice the behaviours they want to foster in the organization. The Team Assessment Tool allowed them to reflect on how the team worked around such values and to come up with an action plan to bring back into their daily operations.

Objectives

• Reunite everyone in a meaningful experience
• Drive team spirit
• Assimilate the values of the UNHCR Code of Conduct into daily operations
• Achieve a value-driven ethical behaviour

Challenges

• Understand how the values Trust, Resilience and innovation should be incorporated into the teams’ dynamic
• Take actionable steps towards values assimilation

Solutions

• UNHCR used the Team Assessment Tool after their team building activity, which acted as a debrief to reflect on how:
  • The team works together
  • What are the areas of improvement
  • How the values and integrated into the teamwork
  • The teams evaluated their work based on the core values trust, resilience, innovation and Rated the competencies around each value
  • Came up with a list of actionable ideas on how to improve their performances
  
  

• All participants have been involved in the Code of Conduct values
• The tool provided a rare opportunity to involve the whole team into rating their performance
• The team now have tangible actions and ideas to take forward
• The report generated will be a useful guide for the organisation to work on values assimilation

“Although we had only half a day, the team building activity and Team Assessment Tool were so effective in highlighting the importance of resilience and innovation that its learnings lingered with us long after.”

The Team Building Experience

UNHCR completed our Chain Reaction experience, where teams were given blueprints to build a series of machines that had to connect together. Team members had to trust each other to complete their assigned machines.

As teams connected their machines, resilience was crucial in overcoming setbacks and making necessary adjustments. Innovation played a key role as teams experimented with machines and agreed on a final design. Following the completion of the Chain Reaction, teams engaged in a meaningful discussion on how the values of Trust, Resilience, and Innovation were utilized during the team building experience. This discussion encompassed successes, areas for gain, and applications in the working environment, including observations from the facilitator to reinforce the learning journey.

Integrating the Digital Tool

Following the discussion, teams log onto the specific Team Assessment Tool created for this experience.

The competencies of Trust, Resilience and Innovation were there along with the addition of Motivation, Team Dynamics and Design Thinking, which all related to the Chain Reaction program and the UNHCR Code of Conduct. These competencies are rated and presented as a Radar Chart. This Rader Chart is a great visual representation to look at where the team is performing well and where there are areas for development.

Coming up with an actionable plan

The Code of Conduct is critical to an organisation such as UNHCR, and participants have been used to incorporate it within their work. The objective was to reinforce it and introduce its new elements in a fun way. The team building activity chosen by UNHCR already referenced the values of Trust, resilience and innovation, but the Team Assessment Tool really helped the team to come up with actionable ways to incorporate such values into their operational work.

To do this, every team first voted on how well they work together in relations to the competences of trust, resilience and innovation. Then, they have been presented with a summary of the results. At this point, each team proposed 5 actions to increase their performance in each of the competence area and each person voted for the 5 actions that they deemed most relvant. Finally, a core few actions were chosen to be taken forward i the daily operation of UNHCR.

More information about Team Assessment Tool.