For me in Operations & Safety, Covid has vastly both changed all of my work, and in some other ways, had virtually zero effect.  I have to focus on Covid a lot, and so that can be psychologically difficult, especially as we are now a year in and we inevitably have to adjust to the idea of fatigue.

What is important for me to stress is the importance of having a comfortable place to work that you can walk away from at the end of the day.  I worked remotely most of the time for years before Covid, so I am fortunate in this regard that I had already given this some thought.  It has helped me to be sure.

I think a continued focus on work-life balance is important in the future.  We are all overachievers, and turning this off is easy to tell others, but much harder to tell ourselves.   We also need to be proactive in making decisions in office occupancy and design to help others to feel better and to understand how they need to adapt with as much notice as is possible.

I think one of the main challenges I’ve seen over the last year is our lack of digital capacity (across the peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian nexus). This has improved over the last 6 months as most people seem to have realised that digital technology isn’t a catch all solution, but a tool to generate solutions.

Another challenge is our lack of coordination across organisations & sectors. We work in sectors that are constrained by resources that are ultimately trying to improve the lives of the most vulnerable in our society. We owe it to them, if not to our own effectiveness, to try and coordinate our actions to maximise impact.

I work on Design, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning, and while the pandemic has forced us to shift and adapt our strategies, especially when it comes to monitoring & data collection, I have also seen it as an opportunity for us to reflect on ways we could be more efficient in the way we collect & share data.

We work in conflict-affected areas, and travel and access to participants are often challenging, and will continue to be when this current health crisis is over. So I hope that some of the adaptations we have made (SMS and phone data collection for monitoring, adapting training on WhatsApp, using dedicated software for social media monitoring to quote a few) will also help us to be more inclusive moving forward. It can also help us reduce our negative impact on the environment, which is another challenge we will continue to grapple with in the post-COVID era!

Curious to hear from other organizations if they have seen similar adaptations that they feel have helped address other challenges and can be positive innovations we continue to use moving forward!

.