Dr Michael Burchell and the US-based consultancy firm that he manages are embarking on a special mission to the Middle East. The company, aptly called Great Place to Work Institute, has begun a five-month programme that seeks to identify the “top companies to work for” in the UAE.
Officially launched on August 16, the programme aims to gather applications from companies in the UAE with 50 or more employees, carry out an employee survey and conduct an independent assessment of the participating employers’ human resources (HR) policies. A shortlist of the Emirates’ top companies will be published in January next year.
Speaking to Alrroya.com, Burchell, who is partner and director of Great Place to Work Institute UAE, said the programme will hopefully highlight the developments that companies in the country have undergone in the recent past years in as far as HR best practices are concerned.
“There are great workplaces everywhere. Our job is to find those organisations, recognise them, learn from them and then teach those lessons and practices to other companies,” he said.
Burchell added that from an industry perspective, he believes that GCC may “still be developing in terms of their human resources, but I think that again, we can probably find some examples, highlight those examples and teach them to others.”
According to the Great Place to Work Institute’s website (
www.greatplacetowork.com), the “Top Companies to Work For” programme is conducted annually in more than 45 countries worldwide spanning regions such as Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Americas. Companies that have made it to their existing global list include FedEx, Microsoft, McDonald’s, Google, Ericsson, Danone, IBM and Cisco, to name a few.
For its initial Middle East survey, Burchell said they will focus on UAE-based companies, but will include companies in other Gulf countries in their next survey in 2011.
And with local and international companies at approximately 350,000 as of 2010 (based on estimates by business directory website UAEdatabase.com), the UAE offers a healthy number of employers waiting to be discovered for this maiden survey.
A ‘great workplace’ defined
Asked what defines a great workplace, Burchell said interestingly, in the 25 years that their institute has been conducting the research, three answers always come up as top factors identified by the employees surveyed.
“Consistently, what we hear from employees [when asked to identify great workplaces] are companies in which employees trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do and enjoy the people they work with,” he said.
The notion of “trust”, Burchell explained, is basically about patience, collaboration, fairness and recognition.
“Pride means pride in one’s job and accomplishments, as well as in the company itself while camaraderie is the presence of a sense of friendliness. We see these things as hallmarks of a great workplace based on what employees said,” he added.
The UAE, as in most of the Gulf states, presents a unique labour market with a huge expatriate workforce – a feature that Burchell believes will give an interesting insight into the survey results.
“There will probably be an impact in terms of having a large expat population. This is something that we’ll discover as we go through the [research] process. I do think, however, that at the end of the day, people who are working here are looking for the same factors – they want to feel valued, connected and engaged. I think that’s true to employees anywhere in the world,” he said.
GCC recruitment starts to gather steam
The Gulf region had not been immune to the global financial crisis that saw several industries slashing their workforce to reduce their operational costs. Following this downsizing, which mostly happened in 2008, the regional job market seems to be gathering pace again.
Online recruitment website Bayt.com and research firm YouGov Siraj reported in August that around 67 per cent of the companies surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region are planning to hire in the last quarter of 2010.
In the GCC, Oman-based companies showed the most promising Jobs Index with 45 per cent of respondents in the sultanate expressing commitment in recruiting new staff within the next 12 months.
About 30 per cent, meanwhile, in the UAE will hire employees within a year as most companies across the Emirates still recuperate from the effects of a property slump.
Burchell likewise noticed some recruitment activities in the region’s job market, an indication that the financial storm is starting to clear and confidence is slowly returning in many industries.
“We’re already beginning to see the job market picking up in the GCC region, but I think this will continue to expand at an ever increasing rate over the next two-three years. Lead among them will be Qatar as well as the UAE,” he said.
He added that while the property and construction sectors might take a while to become upbeat again in their hiring process, other industries such as travel, logistics and financial will likely be on the spotlight.
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