Are you ready to start #NewWork-ing?
What is NewWork?
NewWork is a grassroots movement of UN employees who are innovating, collaborating, and adopting new ways of working. We aim to change our workplace culture and cultivate an agile, people-focused UN 2.0. We do this by amplifying transformative initiatives and bridging silos through dialogue and creativity.
The purpose of NewWork is to help ensure the UN can better respond to humanity’s most pressing challenges while maintaining the well-being, morale, and engagement of our employees. NewWork aims to build a community of individuals who are committed to embedding continuous improvement, agility, and innovation. It is an employee-led, global, empowered network. The network is coordinated by a global group of volunteers and supported by champions applying an agile mindset and principles.
The NewWork Journey
Explore our impact site
NewWork in Action
Teams in Motion (Individual and Team)
- Cultivating deep connection and co-creation for an inclusive future
- United Nations ready to embrace agile
- Transformers: unlocking potential, transforming teams
Culture in Practice (Organizational)
- Culture Day: transforming the UN from within
- Fostering a culture of innovation at the United Nations
- Innovation Day: where ideas converge and boundaries dissolve
- Reimagine the Next Normal: staff voices design United Nations 2.0
Systemic Shifts (Cross-institutional)
- Deep roots, strong branches: cultivating UN transformation through partnership
- Innovation and creativity UN-leashed in Dragons' Den
Hello NewWork!
Field / humanitarian
The Crisis Connection
How agile practices transformed humanitarian response in the field.
Development / coordination
The Collaboration Code
How trust and agile ways of working aligned agencies around shared goals.
Management
The Management Matrix
How modernized practices replaced siloed processes with agile leadership.
These stories are fictional composites illustrating real patterns of change across the NewWork community.
We cannot solve our biggest problems if we do not come together. It is not only about institutions or processes. It is in the first instance about our mindsets.
ANTÓNIO GUTERRES, United Nations Secretary-General
Empowering employees, driving new mindsets
The Secretary-General's Common Agenda and vision for “United Nations 2.0” articulates the drive and impetus for organizational flexibility, agility, and transformation. The UN80 initiative calls for a "paradigm shift in how the UN system organizes its work and collaborates for greater impact". The ability to deliver, to proactively respond to and even prevent future crises, depends on a fundamental rethinking of how we do our work. Culture change is necessary to connect and align the behaviours and mindsets of personnel globally.
With this goal to shift our workplace culture and cultivate an agile, people-focused UN 2.0, NewWork aims to amplify transformative initiatives led by its members and offers opportunities to exchange good practices and scale. NewWork aligns to the Values and Behaviours Framework, as well as Our Common Agenda and the vision for UN 2.0. Taking a non-siloed, collaborative approach to organizational culture change.
NewWork is honored to be part of the UN 2.0 “Quintet of Change” Communities of Practice. NewWork provides a nurturing transformational space where individuals come together to not only champion a collective mindset shift that embraces agility, creativity, learning and adaptability, but also to upgrade soft skills (e.g., complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, interpersonal communications, cultural intelligence, leadership, curiosity, continuous learning).
Links for UN System employees
*Login required. NewWork welcomes ALL UN personnel (e.g. contractors, consultants, interns, volunteers, etc.) to participate in transforming our workplace.