The Case for Change

The current rewards practices at MSF are inadequate for meeting the organisation's present needs and hinder its preparedness for future humanitarian challenges.

MSF current rewards practices have raised concerns due to differences in pay and treatment experienced by different staff groups. These inequities are perceived as unfair, reflecting the privileges enjoyed by a small minority of staff, particularly the international mobile staff (IMS) and HQ staff. Such differences have also been regarded as evidence of institutional racism and discrimination within the organization, which MSF's leadership is committed to address.

Over the years, MSF leaders, staff, and association members have increasingly called for fundamental changes in how staff are rewarded. These calls for change have become louder and more regular in recent years.  Calls for change in MSF's rewards policies are further fueled by the belief that the organisation is not effectively leveraging the talent and potential of its entire workforce to fulfill its social mission. There is a recognition that the existing rewards policies have not kept pace with the evolving organisational structure and fail to support the development of a workforce needed to meet the humanitarian challenge of the future.

Undoubtedly, there is a strong case for change in how MSF rewards its staff, supported by the following points:

• Rewards do not adequately meet operational needs, with difficulties in attracting and retaining staff, high turnover, and gaps.
• Rewards have not evolved in line with workforce trends.  Existing rewards policies do not support the effective functioning of new organizational setups such as regional hubs and hosting methods.  Further, external workforce changes are exacerbating the problems MSF’s rewards practices generate.
• There is no consistent approach to value jobs. Functions are graded differently between programmes and different offices. We use different definitions and requirements for jobs and different function structures. ​ The rapid increases in hosted functions worldwide shows that some local systems are not equipped to consistently or comparatively evaluate these functions. With more and more intersectional hubs and intersectional operations, there are increasing difficulties where scoring of functions is not standard or transparent, leading to tensions.
• MSF’s existing HR infrastructure supports some staff more than others, generating differences in pay and benefits that are not acceptable. These differences in pay and treatment are experienced by different staff groups experiences, and exacerbate the perceptions that these differences encapsulate the privilege that a small minority of staff, namely international mobile staff (IMS) and HQ staff, enjoy. These differences have been increasingly seen as evidence of institutional racism and discrimination in the organisation, which MSF’s leadership pledged to address.

In response to these widely recognised long-standing issues, MSF initiated a Rewards Review to thoroughly analyse and determine the best approach to address these problems. 

For more detailed information on the case for change, please download the following case for change report:

Engaging with stakeholders

Stakeholder engagement has been an essential part of the Rewards Review. MSF’s workforce is large and diverse; its organisational structure is complex; and there is a culture of participative decision-making. This makes engaging stakeholders (and meeting stakeholders’ own expectations for their own engagement) highly complex. Many groups have been actively engaged, including the RIOD, the DEI Community of Practice, HR teams in multiple entities, HoMs, Recruitment and Pool Management Platform, and many other platforms, technical groups, and working groups.  

In the last two years, thousands of staff and stakeholders have contributed to the review, and their contributions have led to the implementation plan.  MSF staff and stakeholders have contributed in the following way:

MSF relies on and greatly appreciates the significant contributions, consultations, and guidance provided by a series of Platforms, technical Working Groups, Communities of Practice, and teams across the MSF Movement.  The support and engagement of these groups continues to inform and drive the direction of the rewards workstreams.

THANK YOU to all the MSF staff and stakeholders who have contributed to the Rewards Review and who are helping to implement these changes.