Measuring to mitigate: Managing psychosocial risks at UNHCR
Humanitarians face workplace stressors that can affect their mental health. A new tool aims to support data-driven strategies to address those stressors at UNHCR.
âThe leadership immediately recognised the urgent need to assess and mitigate the risk â not only to the Operation, but also to staff wellbeing,â recalls Dalia Yaseen, Project Control Officer with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in Jordan.
In early 2025, staff in Jordan were navigating political uncertainty and funding shortfalls that increased workloads and stress. When survey results revealed elevated psychosocial challenges among colleagues, the findings confirmed what many were already sensing. Leadership moved quickly, determined to understand and address the risks.
Around the world, those delivering UNHCRâs mission face threats to their mental health. Some stem from the nature of their work, personal challenges, or unavoidable daily stressors, but some are driven by organizational factors â in other words, how UNHCR operates. Dubravka Suzic, Head of the Psychosocial Wellbeing Unit, and Linda Andersson, Senior HR Project Coordinator with the Unit, wanted to better understand those factors, so UNHCR could nurture a healthier, more resilient workforce.
With support from UNHCRâs Data Innovation Fund and the German Federal Foreign Office, theyâve now pioneered a psychosocial risk management (PSRM) process. Tested across more than a dozen countries, including Jordan, the system is being integrated into organizational practice and piloted elsewhere by other UN agencies. For the first time, UNHCR staff will have at their fingertips the tools to identify, analyse, and address workplace risks likely to impact the mental health and wellbeing of colleagues.
âWhat I really hope for is awareness around how workplace factors impact mental health, productivity, and engagement â and, even more critically, how they can be mitigated,â Linda says.
A high-risk sector â and a data gap
Although evidence is somewhat thin on the ground, what data there is suggests that humanitarian and development workers experience heightened risks to their mental health. In 2023, a United Nations Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) report on the mental health and wellbeing policies and practices of UN system organizations found that UN personnel ârepresent an outlier in terms of psychosocial risk factors faced in the course of employment.â These risks, the review notes, demonstrated a trend of growing concern â potentially hampering these organizationsâ ability to further their mandates. One of several recommendations provided to advance the UN-wide mental health strategy was to integrate mental health and wellbeing considerations into organizational risk management frameworks.
At the time, specific data about the psychosocial risks facing UNHCRâs workforce was hard to come by. Some psychosocial risk assessments had previously been carried out by staff counsellors, but these were challenging to conduct systematically because of the time and level of expertise that was required. To develop a solution, Dubravka and Linda applied to the Data Innovation Fund.
Feedback on the teamâs application was positive; they were supported through the Fund and secured additional resources from the German Federal Foreign Office. Partnering with the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology and guided by UNHCR Innovation, the team developed a tool to collect new data, integrate it with existing datasets, and process it with predictive analytics to inform action. The tool has since been piloted in 15 operations, with more than 1,600 participants, and is now being integrated into UNHCRâs Enterprise Risk Management Framework.
Asking the right questions, learning from the answers
This new psychosocial risk management process begins with a staff survey. Through this questionnaire, data is gathered and then combined with existing information stored on Workday (for instance, sick leave days, which can capture how psychosocial risks are affecting staff and the wider organization). This data is processed using AI machine learning and predictive analytics to identify patterns and trends, reveal where key challenges are, and provide an actionable overview of risks faced by colleagues.
The resulting data is presented on a dashboard (in fact, the project has developed multiple dashboards, providing insights of varying granularity) with a user-friendly interface, incorporating a range of filtering options to make it easy to find specific information.
To make engagement with the data simpler still, the team are currently developing a chatbot, which will enable colleagues to provide prompts and receive curated summaries of relevant insights. The tool provides recommendations to mitigate the present psychosocial risks. Eventually, the team also aims to incorporate what Linda calls a âreturn-on-investment pieceâ â in other words, the potential cost of inaction.
âWhat we are doing here has, to our knowledge, never been done before,â Linda says. As with any innovation, it was not smooth sailing. âWe knew from the get-go that the data protection part would be demanding, but we still underestimated how complex it would be,â Linda recalls. The team hired external consultants to perform a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), built in data privacy safeguards, engaged experts to conduct penetration testing, and ensured that all data was stored and processed exclusively in secure native digital environments.
Innovation in action
The dashboards developed by this project are currently populated with data from the 15 Country Operations that piloted the new approach. Exploring this information is simple and, sometimes, surprising. Filters enable the user to see how psychosocial risks affect the mental health, work engagement, or job satisfaction of different groups of personnel. For instance, the pilot data suggests that the impact of psychosocial risks is greater for women than men. While one might expect a higher psychosocial risk in hardship locations, the opposite seems to be the truth. These kinds of details enable UNHCR to challenge typical assumptions and target interventions more accurately.
In Jordan, the Operation quickly dove into the data, to understand more precisely what was driving its elevated scores. A PSRM Action Group was formed, including focal points from senior management, Human Resources, Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), the regional Staff Counsellor, Peer Advisors, and the staff representative. During regular meetings, the data and recommendations provided by the tool were reviewed and discussed. In consultation with the regional Risk Management Advisor, a risk statement was formulated, capturing the three main issues identified by the tool: career development, unmanageable workloads, and work-life balance.
Putting the data to work
The PSRM tool gives colleagues the chance to collect and analyze much-needed data â but its impact will depend on the action taken based on this information. âThis is just something that can start the conversation,â Linda says. âOnce this first phase of risk identification and assessment is concluded, the action group takes over â to really look at the context and decide what interventions might make sense in that context. That process is where we want to keep the focus.â
In Jordan, the dedicated, interdisciplinary Action Group lost no time developing an action-oriented response to mitigate the identified risks. They reviewed the list of evidence-based action recommendations provided by the dashboard, then further refined them to make them more appropriate and actionable in their context.
The Operation, as it formulated its response, focused on transparent, regular communication with colleagues. This looked like Q&A channels, peer-led sessions, and increased personal engagement from Operation management through Town Hall sessions and field visits. Input on the process was solicited from colleagues, often via the Staff Association. âWhen we first initiated this, very few staff participated,â Dalia says. âBut when they saw that we were hearing their suggestions and, if we could do it, doing it, the participation grew.â
As the Operationâs ERM focal point, Dalia is closely following up on the implementation of mitigation measures. Investment and engagement from Operation management, and alignment with existing risk management protocols, is, for her, key to the success of this new PSRM system. Anecdotally, her interactions with colleagues suggest the process has, so far, altered the workforceâs experience for the better. But only time â and further data collection and analysis â will tell.
For her part, Dalia is keen to see regular use of this tool, to develop effective, evidence-based psychosocial risk management. âItâs not only that I feel better when I see that people around me are doing better â but also, if they have less stress, they will be more productive,â she says. âThey will not be so unattached, they will be more focused.â
Integrating and scaling
This innovation is a significant step forward, because it provides critical evidence on the impact of psychosocial risks and the organizational factors contributing to those risks. As Jordanâs experience indicates, its value lies in the quality of discussions it sparks and the changes it makes possible. Now, as the tool is mainstreamed into organizational practice, on a voluntary basis, its real utility will be made clear.
Wider applications are also being explored. A UN interagency working group on PSRM â formed under the auspices of the UN Workplace Global Mental Health Strategy, its membership including UNHCR â intends to pilot these new tools across several agencies, including the World Food Programme, the International Labor Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and UNICEF.
Linda wholeheartedly encourages other UN agencies, and other humanitarian organizations, to learn from the teamâs experience and to either adapt existing tools or develop their own data-driven PSRM systems. âI think this is an amazing opportunity to learn more about how to promote healthy psychosocial work environments and good mental health at work,â she says, âand how to mitigate difficulties at the level of Country Operations and also at the level of the organization.â
Read more about UNHCRâs Data Innovation work.