From the Laptop of the Regional Director…May 2010

May 5, 2010 in Uncategorized

Dear all

If you think back to the Regional Centre retreat we talked alot about communication and how we can all improve the way in which we can communicate. We all have a responsibility to improve our communication and I suggested I should have a regular communication with regional staff – so here is my first attempt!

Ways to get your views across

I hope you all know that your views and opinions are important to the senior management team (BRMT – Business regional management team) – just to remind you that the senior managers in the Regional Centre are David, Suchada, Kang, Arif, Amir and Cherian – we meet every 6 weeks to discuss and make decisions about everyday business of the RC and support to country programmes. Your manager should update you after each BRMT meeting and tell you about any developments or changes which will effect you.

If you have concerns or suggestions you should talk them through with your line manager. Take the opportunity of your regular one to one meetings to talk through what you would like your manager to know and understand about your work and working environment. I have one to one meetings with all my line management reports at least every 6 weeks – sometimes more often – and we discuss how their teams are working, changes which need to be made, successes and things that need to be improved.

You also have the opportunity to join the staff association – this is a forum where staff meet together to discuss issues which effect them. Representatives of the staff association meet with the RD and RHRM regularly to have the opportunity discuss issues relating to working in the RC. The staff association is an important channel of communication – do support it!

Use the RC staff meetings to demonstrate your successes, get feedback from colleagues, ask for advice!

If you don’t feel that you are being heard, you can always talk to me! I take all feedback seriously.

Leadership in the Region

Decisions about the strategic direction of the region are made by the Regional Management Team (the BRMT and all Country Directors) and we meet together every 6 months. We take an overview of the work of the region, monitor progress and impact. All the RMT are involved in decisions which directly affect the region.

The RC team

As you will all be aware, there have been some staff changes in the RC. All new staff are very welcome and we hope that you will enjoy working for Oxfam!

We welcome Lek (Finance Coordinator) and Jeab (Contract Accountability) to the Business team – many thanks to Eugenie for her hard work over the past month and her handover to Jeab. Nun has joined as L&D adviser in the HR team.

We also welcome new regional staff based in country programmes – Susi (Regional Humanitarian Logs), Puspa (Regional Food Security), Tatak (Regional Change Lead – Building effective governments) all based in Indonesia. We must work hard to ensure that staff based outside Bangkok feel that they are part of the RC team and included in staff meetings and other activities.

It is a great opportunity for us to have join staff join the team – they come bringing new ideas, new enthusiasm – they may challenge the way we do some things – and we should look at that as positive – as by changing and evolving we do our job better.

Celebrating success

And finally, we have completed the Ketsana response in the Philippines and the Pandang response in Indonesia – well done to all those who were involved in those responses throughout the last 6 months – the fact that the responses have been successfully completed is a credit to the vision and hard work of all those involved from the very beginning and the effectiveness of our Regional Emergency response team approach.

Feedback is valued

So this is the end of my first ‘from the laptop of the RD’……..I will put the next one out at the beginning of June. Let me know what you think!

With best wishes

Sarah

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