Expect More From Your Humanitarian Safety Practitioner

In this blog post, Chris McIntosh reflects on the evolution of the role of humanitarian security practitioner, how security staff can improve their work, and how organisations can better utilise the skills of those responsible for safety and security.

In social meetings of humanitarians, there’s usually a moment when the group starts swapping stories about safety/security staff from the past. Vignettes range from the enthusiastic to the disgusted, by way of the incredulous, and a lot in between. I genuinely hope you’re reading this thinking, “Actually, my experiences have been pretty good with safety staff”. More than likely though, your mind is casting an eye back on a checkered parade of safety practitioners whom you’ve encountered. It’s not impossible I was one of those. At the risk of ruffling some feathers, and after several years of wanting to share some ideas, I’m happy to be offering a different way of doing business.

If you’re someone managing or working with humanitarian safety staff, expect more, ask for more. For too long, the sector has accepted less, and it continues to do so for a variety of reasons. On a fundamental level though, it’s because best practices have never been established for what makes good security people good and what makes not good ones, not good. It’s a pure crapshoot as people rotate through positions, sometimes with similar philosophies, often with different ideas. Yes, many positions are like this and no, the concept is not unique to security staff. I submit, though, the deviation in approaches from practitioner to practitioner most certainly is.

If we should expect more, what is accepting less? Accepting less is not engaging, coaching, and challenging safety staff when they let you down, when they adhere to the trope of bull-headed people with arms crossed saying, “No, you can’t go there, it’s too dangerous there.” Promisingly, in the last few years, I’ve started to hear more humanitarian security professionals lean into the idea of enabling access versus hindering it. Yet still, there is a deep and wide chasm between saying those words and putting them into practice. For this, we need to look at the details and in the below, I get into the guts of it. Some of what I say is tame, some is thought provoking, and some is intentionally controversial.

It Doesn’t Matter Where You Came From, It Matters Where You’re Going

Regarding the background of your safety person, let’s get something out of the way. Their past doesn’t matter. Their attitude and approach to the work and most important, their attitude towards staff does. When people have complained to me about their safety practitioner, I often trace back the problem to that individual failing to put their military or police background behind them. They still believe the values, procedures, and professional approach of the rigid structures have a place in the humanitarian workplace. This manifests in a few ways so let’s parse them.

A tendency to be less consultative and overly directive. In the military/law enforcement, staff follow orders regardless of whether they are explained the reasons behind them or not. The disconnect is in certain practitioners who don’t understand that civilians like to know why rules are put in place and they like to know how leadership arrived at the avoidance and mitigation measures they did. Humanitarian staff need to understand the context and passing up the opportunity to explain a bit in these moments is a missed opportunity. It’s more than okay to say what you need and what you’d like. Additionally, know your organization’s policy around safety decision making. It is common for safety practitioners to get out over their skis believing they have a say in the mission criticality of an activity and/or play bouncer when it comes to field movements. If they aren’t acting within basic parameters of organizational policy, start the conversation by stating that policy and move forward with this in mind.

An inherently confrontational attitude towards staff. Linked to the above, this is the classic “me versus them” approach in which a security practitioner does not see themselves as part of the team. Security is a support function like any other and should be treated as such. It’s hard for humanitarian staff to do this if the individual is determined to be treated differently. This is tricky to manage, but reinforcing the notion that “we’re all on one team” is a good first step in remedying this issue.

They think military language with lots of acronyms is appropriate and helpful. Tell them it just isn’t, that there are enough acronyms already, nobody needs to learn more and be frustrated reading reports that include too much alphabet soup. And no, glossaries aren’t the answer. Speaking and writing like a normal person is. Challenge unproductive communication and help them understand that robotic, formal language is confusing and enigmatic. When appropriate, let them know that it just makes you want to stop reading/ istening.

Tailored Analysis Is Not A Nice To Have

Not long ago, I heard the phrase, “context blind” in reference to a humanitarian security practitioner. Years ago, I heard a peer say, “I don’t really bother about context analysis”. Just the other day, a staff member from an organization shared that the only analysis they receive from their security staff comes from INSO and UNDSS. It’s worth unpacking this because I fear these are too prevalent attitudes and approaches to a major building block of managing field safety.

When we do this humanitarian safety job properly, almost everything stems from analysis of the context, matched with the specific risk profile of the organization. In turn, this involves taking into account its geographic locations, programmatic activities, advocacy efforts, the individual risk profiles of certain staff, and anything else that bears relevance. This cannot be outsourced. Of any staff in a program, security people don’t get to opt out of understanding the context or fall back on being” context-blind”. As a teacher of mine used to say after receiving an incorrect answer, “No, that just will not do.” Security practitioners ought to be curious and interested in the context. Hopefully, your agency hired someone in the first place to do this work. Asking for something that specifically explains why the craziness happening in the context matters to you is not unreasonable; it is fundamental.

If I’m not mistaken, there is a range of animals that can be trained to move something from point A to point B. Your agency doesn’t need to pay a full-time salary to a security person so they can forward someone else’s analysis products. It is literally their job to soak it all up, filter, add some analysis of their own, and promulgate that to you. It’s also their job to advise based on this. If they aren’t advising based on a synthesis of your information resources and internal programming, then you may as well be consulting Tarot cards, tea leaves, and the retrograde status of Mercury.

On a related note, numbers, charts, graphs, and incident lists are all examples of raw data. Raw data is the basis of good analysis and can complement an explanation of relevance to the audience, but it cannot stand in its stead. As consumers of security products, you should not be expected to digest copious amounts of raw data. That is why you have safety staff. When they send you a several page report laden with data lists and light on analysis, it is precisely the same action as a restaurant server who drops raw meat and potatoes on your table after you ordered steak frites. You’d send back the raw meat and potatoes, so send back pure raw data. On this, make your mantra, “less is more”, encourage your safety staff to adopt the same, and deliver practical analysis that doesn’t take all morning to read.

To Traffic Cop or Not to Traffic Cop, That is the Question

If we know each other, even as acquaintances, you’ve probably heard me give the traffic police speech. (I’ll try to make this version a little more interesting). I refer to practitioners who limit their vocabulary to YES or NO as the traffic cops in our business. Some among these also accept the orange light meaning MAYBE which sometimes is an honest maybe, and is other times just a slow NO.

I’m not sure what it is exactly, perhaps a compulsion for all things to be black and white, or maybe some incredibly pleasurable endorphins that get released into the bloodstream, or a feeling of superiority that comes from delivering a final verdict, but I don’t understand any of it. To be frank with you, if I could, I’d gather up all the phrases like “green light”, “Go”, “No-Go” and banish them to the scrap heap where they can live along with all the other outdated language that has no place in today’s humanitarian space.

Let’s all take a deep breath and remember, we’re humanitarians doing our best to navigate difficult environments that are intricate, tricky, and messy, not legal judges drawing on decades of experience to give our rulings. Yes, there are processes we can follow and yes, we should be methodical, but the work we do as safety practitioners is not black magic. It sure as anything isn’t an exact science. Our communication should reflect this nuance and not be limited. When I mentor safety colleagues, I encourage them to find a way to “Yes, but…” or “Yes, and…”. Aiming for solutions in this spirit go much further than red lights and green lights.

We are at our best when we are regular people who sincerely care about program teams getting where they need to go to assist those most in need. We do our finest work when we put people in need first, even and especially before our egos.

Humanitarian Safety Is Evolving, So Should We

These days, humanitarian safety practitioners are writing SOPs for PEP Kits that they have on hand; they are getting trained to administer psychological first aid and teaching regular first aid; they are devising better ways to improve staff wellbeing. When I started just ten years ago, these were not activities safety staff were expected to undertake, but it is becoming increasingly more common for safety staff to step up and address the gaps inevitably left by overwhelmed management and HR.

This is a positive sign because looking after staff in challenged contexts takes a lot more than the traditional tasks we associate as being purely “safety” – procuring fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, first aid kits, and recommending more barbed wire for a compound. Management and HR in country programs consistently have very full plates and even if they have good intentions to spend more effort on elevating staff welfare, there’s a rotating gambit of issues that take priority – the unceasing, grinding mill of hiring processes; maintaining donor relations; feeding the Regional and HQ beasts; fielding all manner of formal and informal complaints, and this list goes on.

As much as we safety people like to walk swiftly around offices, furrowing our brows while wringing our hands, the act belies the additional bandwidth we often possess to take on these little projects with huge impact. It is not unreasonable to invite safety staff to take part in or even lead these sorts of activities. If one needs an explanation of how this is related to safety, let me put it this way.  Staff realize threats connected to mental health far more often than the headliners we avoid and mitigate like explosions and kidnapping. Humanitarian staff are far more likely to experience burnout and clinical depression than anything traditionally occupying fields on our risk matrices. This, in turn, makes staff more susceptible to other risks because their minds are elsewhere and they aren’t paying attention. Consequently, everyone benefits from having a little extra focus on their wellbeing, management can chalk it up as a win, and it’s an excellent way for safety staff to meaningfully ingratiate themselves to staff while fostering a culture of care and mutual respect. That is an everybody wins deal.

The Pitfalls of Administration and Logistics

In every role I’ve held as a humanitarian safety person, without fail, there has been at least one onerous, time-consuming administrative task that gets gifted to security staff. To highlight a couple of gems – in Iraq, it was playing courier with authorization letters to the many military and government offices for signatures and stamps which needed to happen each month because these letters had shelf lives shorter than a container of milk. In Ukraine, it was filling out field trip forms for nearly each and every movement, field and normal business travel which included entry and exit from the country.

Now look, I understand how this happens, and you do too. In the first place, nobody wants these tasks for obvious reasons, so the Admin or other staff who might normally assume responsibility, start looking around for a teammate they can toss it to. If it’s even tangentially safety-related, then it predictably comes our way because in the minds of many of our colleagues, we aren’t doing all that much anyway. This right here is a critical juncture very germane to my basic thesis.

If you think or know that your safety staff are sitting around reading the news and playing solitaire between long smoke breaks and meetings, giving them an unenviable administrative task is not the way to fix it. Doing so is the equivalent of saying, “Here, make yourself useful…” This is not expecting more. It is not only accepting less; it is encouraging less in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Similarly, safety staff are not logistics, nor should roles be mixed except under rare circumstances. Whoever gifted the sector with that asinine ball of dual-hatting either didn’t understand safety,  logistics, or either. If you are working in an environment that warrants security staff, don’t kid yourself into thinking it is covered by handing that responsibility to the busiest people in the program. Do you really see a scenario outside of a crisis in which a logistician/safety focal point would make time for safety when they have to deal with supply chains and procurement?

Like me, you’ve probably also seen situations in which security staff are also fleet managers. I’ve heard the arguments for this – that security needs to know where people are at all times and so it “makes sense” for them to manage drivers and cars. This is the same thinking that goes into a lot of half-baked decisions. In a crisis, security might need some personal information about staff but that doesn’t mean HR hands over their staff files. On this fleet management question and a few others that typically arise, it is a matter of accountability being confused with security. Accountability is the foundation of safety and security – we can’t keep staff safe if we don’t know where staff are. However, maintaining accountability does not require a safety professional, it requires anyone with basic office skills and attention to detail. To be clear, I am not saying that safety staff shouldn’t or cannot lend a helping hand when it’s required. I’m very much for stepping outside our normal duties to pitch in when it’s needed, but I’m very much against safety staff permanently owning these tasks. Those are two extremely different things.

Putting administrative and/or logistical responsibilities on the shoulders of safety staff is a cop out. It’s giving up on them, and it’s giving up on the idea your program can operate more safely, particularly in hard-to-reach areas. Done well, the work of humanitarian safety involves a few different components. Below are the main ones, though not a comprehensive list. Hopefully, it looks a lot more productive and meaningful than the tasks discussed above. The teams I have worked with and I spent most of our time trying to chase down these tasks and their related components and it was always more than a fulltime job.

• Delivering analysis products on a regular and ad hoc analysis basis, that consistently seek to answer two basic questions – What’s going on? Why should staff in your agency care that it’s happening? (How is it relevant to them?).

• Doing site and area assessments to inform decision making. For example, advising on good locations for an office or guesthouse and how program staff can get to a new location and what they need to consider before going there.

• Engaging management in contingency planning by discussing various scenarios and pinpointing key tasks to get them accomplished. This also included drafting practical, actionable documents that help shape understandings of possible scenarios and implications of them.

• Pursuant to the above, working on crisis management readiness, facilitating crisis management training, and being heavily involved in case of a crisis.

• Identifying needed, relevant training and making it happen either by organizing an external resource or ideally, doing the training in-house.

• Senior safety focal points, advisers, coordinators, managers specifically, should be active members of senior management teams or otherwise ensure they are counseling management on support needed to foster, reinforce a strong culture of safety and staff care. This includes suggesting tweaks or the creation of policies and ensuring steady communication to all staff on related matters.

Mind the Pendulum

In program after program, I’ve witnessed the psychological phenomenon in which staff will rail against rules and curfew times, they will piss and moan like champions about how overly cautious “your rules” are. I try to remind them that these are actually our rules; the Country Director signed off on them. In these moments, I attempt to mollify folks who think I’m there to “get in the way of their jobs”, as a presumptuous colleague once told me when we met for the first time.

Some weeks will go by and with the very same people, I’ll have different confrontations in which they anxiously accuse safety staff of not doing nearly enough. Then they start asking what we are going to do to fix a context that is acting exactly as we’d been explaining for weeks that it would. That episode subsides, a week or two goes by, and the contempt for “your rules” return. So the pendulum swings and while it is painfully cliché to say, William Webster’s adage holds true, “Security is always seen as too much until the day it is not enough.” I don’t love this dynamic, but I do find it fascinating how people continuously exhibit this oscillation.

The only way to try to achieve stasis with that pendulum is to understand what the threats are, and equally important, what the threats are not. Naturally, our minds will insert bad things into gaps of understanding so knowing what is realistic and what isn’t, helpfully rounds out our picture of the context. If your safety people are not delivering this information, that’s one thing. If they are and you’re never listening or reading any of it, or asking questions, that’s a very different thing.

Unstable contexts will worsen from time to time and I’m not even suggesting you should handle that stoically. I am saying that your experience through a deterioration will be exponentially less severe if you remain at least somewhat abreast of the situation, little by little over time. Living and working in dicey environments is a slow marathon in which you have to remain ready for threats to appear regularly. It is not a series of periodic sprints between islands of everything being totally fine. Working for humanitarian agencies in unstable environments comes with the responsibility to be informed about the situation, the same as we do for all manner of things – checking the weather before we get dressed or seeing how much traffic there is before we get on the road. It’s more than a little silly when less effort is put into understanding extant risks where we live.

Additionally, having experienced this first hand, in the face of spitting mad staff, let me submit this humble reminder. Your safety staff have a fair bit of power, though no matter what the case, they do not wield any control over the missiles flying in, the bullets whizzing about, the bombs blowing up, or the natural disasters looming on the horizon. It may feel good to lay blame for these things at their feet and act accordingly, but please don’t. It is deeply unfair and does not accomplish anything productive. Not being okay with the environment is okay and manageable. Lying about it and/or taking it out on others is pretty far from okay.

A little patience and respect goes a long way, and the best way to address your concerns with safety staff on anything is the same way you would any other support staff colleague – by being open and courteous. The more you treat them as your peers, the easier it will be to work with them.

Another Thing and Over To You

To expect more of your safety staff, you also need to expect more of yourselves. Yeah, you probably knew this was coming. Everyone has a role to play in a program and with sweeping budget cuts, this is only increasingly more the case. In the same way that they should be enabling you to do your job better, so too should you be returning the favor.

Unilaterally approving travel to locations that haven’t been assessed, signing a contract on a property that security staff haven’t seen, or generally leaving them out of conversations that relate to the safety of staff isn’t a solution. It’s not even professional; it’s just lazy.

Over the years, I’ve noticed the tendency of some managers who believe they can do the job of safety practitioners as well or better than we can. I’ll be the first to agree wholeheartedly that this may very well be the case with one caveat – not while you’re doing your day job. There is a time and place for managers to assume security responsibilities. In permissive environments or as a short-term cover, this makes sense. Otherwise, it is a dangerous fallacy most often borne out of hubris. Your staff in high risk locations deserve a high standard of duty of care and if you think you’re going to provide that while also managing budgets, people, program activities, and donors, please reconsider that position. If you’re working in a tough environment, you need dedicated safety staff. We can debate the particulars around this at length, but they’ve got to be on the job.

In this article, I’ve been very critical, starting with the title, but I do not want any of what I’ve written to be mistaken for supporting the marginalization, circumventing, or bullying of safety staff which I’ve seen and experienced far too much. That is the opposite of expecting more. It is cowardice in action very poorly disguised as pragmatism. Come to an agreement with the safety staff or don’t, but give them the chance to offer input; that’s what they are there to do.

If the above elicited some feeling – good. It’s high time we stop swapping niceties and tiptoeing around frustrations, move past the point of pretending that we’re all on the same page, and start having difficult conversations that will ultimately lead to enhancing the safety and security of staff doing humanitarian programming in genuinely tough places. Heartily agree with me, vehemently disagree, or both. But after that, honor the sacrifices all humanitarians make in challenged contexts by putting that energy towards solution-oriented conversations with your safety staff and ultimately, expect more of them, expect more of yourselves. People are counting on us.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or position of GISF or the author’s employers. 

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