Total Home Experience One, or THE One, operates 14 (going on 15) retail ‘theaters’ in the Gulf and Levant regions. Here, customers purchase feelings that reach them in the form of home furnishings. 

In 1996, the company started from scratch as a United Arab Emirates-based furniture retailer, founded by entrepreneur Thomas Lundgren in partnership with two individual investors, one from Kuwait and one from Abu Dhabi. Now it employs some 370 staff in the UAE and more than 200 in its stores in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan. At the time of Executive’s interview with Lundgren in January, the company was finalizing preparations for two 2012 store openings in Lebanon (financial details were not offered). 

As the highest ranking locally established company in the Top Companies to Work for in the UAE for the second year running, and one of the three Top Companies for Women, THE One would be perfectly described as a case-study in healthy corporate culture, were it not for the hearty dislike of the word “corporate” by Lundgren — a Swede who testifies that his professional life of 27 years in retail was preceded by an almost-career as goalie of his motherland’s national ice hockey team. 

His scintillating approach to business entails a deep distrust of banking, a playful approach to words, strong convictions on practically everything and an even stronger practice of capitalist social action. An all-encompassing commitment to love, life, belief and dare are the core values of the company. Lundgren defines his retail spaces as theaters and his business cards come in the form of four theater admission stubs, one for each core value of the company, with four different interpretations of his CEO title. 

The Great Places to Work (GPTW) comments on the company’s culture audit for the 2012 list underscore the community programs of THE One, whose signature THE Onederworld is a sustainable village program in Kenya. In its 2011 benchmark report, GPTW additionally highlighted the company’s assistance for over-indebted employees during the UAE financial crisis and its holistic interviewing approach in selecting job applicants.  

The achievement of making the Top Ten companies was doubly sweet for THE One because the whole blue collar workforce participated in the employee trust index survey. “What I am proud of with our company is not only that we have done this and are ahead of many other companies but all my warehouse people, my delivery team and my cleaners, were part of the number that answered,” Lundgren tells Executive.

Being a top company to work for in the UAE was a key component in the vision that drove its founding. “Before I started the company I dreamt about it being the number one company to work for. I wasn’t surprised to be in the top ten [last year] because I do believe that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed is the king,” Lundgren says. 

“Many companies, in the best case, talk about caring for their people but they don’t [implement this],” he elaborates, adding that he would not be able to name any fully locally owned company that has a system for implementing a process such as GPTW.  

Although his favorite interpretation of CEO is Chief Emotional Officer, Lundgren qualifies a top workplace as a “no kissy-kissy” company. Instead, he compares it to a Formula One team where every team member has to be high performer and best at whatever it is they do. 

Employee development is critical for this reason and people must fit with THE One culture. “You can’t impose core values on people. We must hire people that have the same values that we have. ‘Everybody else’ may be good people but they should not work with us,” he says. 

In 2011, THE One reintroduced several activities that the company had put on ice during the UAE economic crisis. “We had forgotten what we were very good at before, which was celebrating. Celebrating was one of the biggest things that we brought back,” Lundgren freely admits, crediting the GPTW process for learning from employees that they wanted to celebrate again. 

Another strengthening aspect of THE One’s culture is training, which last year increased to 40 hours per employee, up from 34 hours in 2010. But the focus is shifting from quantity to quality, according to Lundgren.    

In future UAE Top Company rankings, THE One wants to beat the multinational companies.

Work has a profound influence upon us. Much more than a means of survival, it is a main source of self-esteem and lifetime relationships, not to mention the cumulative wealth of nations. In terms of time spent on the planet, work comprises the bulk of our lives. In work, we interact purposely with materials, tools, technologies and people. In work, we prove our worth to ourselves and derive our value as individuals. 

Through work we produce, as societies and a global community, that magic number called gross domestic product. Despite all other newfangled ways in which we measure quality of life in any nation — the widely used UN’s Human Development Index or the exotic Gross National Happiness Index introduced by the nation of Bhutan — per capita GDP is still the key determinant in measuring the success and comparative perception of countries. After the avoidance of total self-destruction, the world’s leading concerns remain GDP growth and job creation.  

So much for the good side 

“Labor is not a commodity”, emphasizes the International Labor Organization. This is a reminder that throughout the history of work, not only have people exploited others but also we as individuals have pressured ourselves, and our peers, make one of our most basic human endeavors a pain rather than a pleasure. 

Much of the agony surfaces at the workplace. Mobbing, labor fights, slavish fixation on status, titles and career symbols, and many other destructive patterns of behavior are linked to what we do and put ourselves through. 

Work-related diseases, explosive societal inequities and destructive impacts on families from widespread work-life disparities are all realities of developed economies. Beyond the cases of highly reported imbalances, however, quietly hovers a widespread phenomenon. It is an internal dissatisfaction and disengagement from work where individuals spend their days with the self-perception of being pigeonholed in this or that dead-end routine job.     

Human capital is the oldest, newest, and above all, most important and underdeveloped asset in any economy. The persistent ambiguity in the way we experience work and the humorous discrepancies between upside potentials and downside threats to meaningful labor make it even more important to improve the quality of our workplaces across cultures and better the work environments in the countries we call home. 

Uppers and downers

At first impression, the performance of UAE-based organizations in the Great Place to Work Institute’s (GPTWI) valuation process is a combination of consistence and improvement as only two new companies entered the top ten ranks. Both companies told Executive that they wanted to participate in the process in 2011 but felt that they were not ready at the time. 

As a rule does GPTWI does not divulge information if any dropped-out companies have withdrawn from the process. Yet, Executive has learned that one of the two, the Zayed University opted out of participation in the 2012 process, citing preoccupation with other strategic priorities and lack of time as the main reasons. The other, SHUUA Capital, has experienced a range of unfortunate events from layoffs to leadership changes.  

The lack of sizeable movement among the rankings in both years, however, seems to confirm that the quality of work in all companies that were ranked has remained relatively stable. By comparison, in the top 100 ranking in the United States, as a percent of the total, more than double move in or out of the rankings. 

The rate of turnover on the GPTWI lists is an important reminder to both companies enrolled in the process and seekers of employment opportunities that a place on the list in one year is not a reason for complacency with what has been gained or lost. 

A rewarding experience

But given that they were recognized as top companies, the organizations’ leaders interviewed by Executive for this report confirmed, with no exception, that they found the experience rewarding. 

 “We have learned a lot in participating [in the first list] last year. I was surprised that my team, the whole top [leadership] team, learned much more from GPTWI than I ever expected,” THE One’s CEO Thomas Lundgren said. 

The UAE subsidiaries of multinational companies with an employee feedback processes also said that the GPTWI trust index reaffirmed and expanded what they are learning from their in-house employee appreciation questionnaires. 

Microsoft Gulf’s General Manager Samer Abu-Ltaif phrased it by saying that while internal surveys were the main tool used to assess the company’s journey, “I consider the GPTWI a learning opportunity for us because the feedback helps us improve.”

Overall, the experience seemed to be an enhancer of positive competition on improving workplace quality and corporate cultures for participating companies in the UAE’s work environment. As two of the ten corporate leaders told Executive in identical words, “GPTWI raises the bar.”  

Mixed race, real results

Raising that bar may prove to be of substantial merit to the UAE and its ambitions to assume a greater role in the global business fabric. Aided by the country’s open employment policy, all companies in the top ten stated that the diversity of nationalities in their organizations greatly contributes to their work culture and is often an advantage that Dubai-based units of multinationals have over other units elsewhere. 

In the realm of gender equality, opportunities for women to shape corporate cultures in the UAE, not to mention in other countries in the Gulf, are still not easily found. An increase in the employment of women in decision-making roles might boost productivity and profitability of organizations as much as the diversity of different nationalities does, according to expert Fiona Dent of UK-based Ashridge Business School [see page 48]. 

Dent’s observation that the number of women in the UAE’s business schools has increased substantially from five years ago is confirmed by Talent Director Tamela Scotcher at OMG, one of GPTWI’s top ten companies to work for in the UAE and one of the three top companies for women to work in. “Traditionally, the CVs we received tended to have a male bias. This is no longer the case and it is now far more balanced between genders. It seems this applies not only to our industry [media] but also a range of other industries in the UAE. The emancipation of women and their empowerment is obvious in the workplace,” Scotcher told Executive. 

According to GPTWI UAE’s CEO Farrukh Kidwai, companies that realize excellent workplace cultures tend to outperform on profits because, when customers perceive a company as a great place to work, “your customer base is going up [and] your profits are going up.” 

On the side of employee motivation, pride in what one is doing works wonders, he added. “What does it do when you say you feel proud to be part of your organization? It means you give 110 percent and 110 percent translates into 220 percent for the organization.” [See page 46].

Gallup, the international research organization, corroborates the impact of workplace quality on the overall performance of companies in the Middle East. In research results published last month, the company said that employee empowerment in the UAE was at 25 percent, meaning one in four respondents said she/he feels completely empowered in their role when polled in the survey.

This ratio is “about right when benchmarked across the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] but it is quite low when compared with, for example, Western Europe,” commented behavioral economist Ehssan Abdallah, a senior practice consultant with Gallup Consulting Middle East and Africa. According to Abdallah, low empowerment results in decreased employee engagement; the psychological bond and psychological commitment of employees decreases which inevitably results in poor performance. “The compounding effect… is that poor performance will result in a poor customer experience. That decreased performance also has a direct link to employee health,” he said. “If my employer doesn’t look after me from an empowerment perspective, the likelihood of him not looking after my health is higher.” 

He believes the UAE is at the forefront of the GCC in addressing the issue of employee empowerment. “They are on the sharp edge of change when compared with other countries in the Middle East. Both UAE-owned companies and units of international organizations that are based here are realizing that by setting up a performance-based culture, they reap dividends.” 

For those who have grown up in the Middle East, the increasing number of PepsiCo brands have proven to be sweet companions on the journey from the crib to the cubicle. In the past two decades, many Pepsi products still come out on top as regional consumer favorites. What’s more, the presence of a complete supply chain in the region means that PepsiCo can face the hotly contested market for fast moving consumer goods with a home-team advantage. 

What speaks favorably to the presence of not only the company’s products but of its corporate investment in the United Arab Emirates is that PepsiCo has located the leadership team and administration of its entire Asia, Middle East and Africa (AMEA) Division in the heart of Dubai. 

According to PepsiCo’s 2010 annual report, India, China, and the Middle East all saw strong demand growth for both snacks and beverages marketed by the corporation. The AMEA division is one of the four core business units in the global corporation and is in charge of nearly $6 billion in annual revenues.  

AMEA is the youngest of the four divisions of PepsiCo. But there are indications that it can be a springboard for the corporation’s growth as PepsiCo’s global leadership considers new initiatives to expand its investments and position in the US and many international markets as well as renew parts of its top leadership this year. 

The division head office in Dubai has business reach in four continents and handles markets stretching from New Zealand to Morocco. The division’s head office staff and management participated in both the 2012 and 2011 Trust Index surveys and culture audits by the Great Place to Work Institute (GPTWI) and have scored near the top in both years. On top of this, PepsiCo also was identified and highlighted by GPTWI as one of two companies with exemplary practices in hiring, developing and retaining Emirati talent. 

Dubai’s multicultural identity is mirrored in the PepsiCo workforce, which comprises more than 40 nationalities and a few hundred employees — not an unusual feature of workforces in the UAE, but one which would be much more difficult to achieve in most other places.  

“I think the multinational people that we have operating in this office are a big advantage,” says Joseph Zakaria, vice president of operations at PepsiCo AMEA. 

This diversity jibes well with the nature of a head office, he tells Executive, and also results in a wider range of perspectives during discussions regarding operational issues. “You can see from the ideas that come up how [people from different places] think. For me, this is value-added,” says Zakaria. 

Integration of all this diversity under a single corporate culture is an important task.

The GPTWI Culture Audit of the PepsiCo organization in the UAE points out that newcomers to the team benefit from double mentoring by an assigned “functional on-boarding coach” and by a “culture coach.”     

Besides making the best of multiculturalism in its workforce, attracting local talent is “very important” for the organization and UAE talent has been responsive to competitively paid jobs that awarded them with opportunities to gain experience, Zakaria explains. “I can say that Emiratis whom we have been able to attract [are still with the company]; some of them have eight years with PepsiCo.” 

The company is actively developing its approach to universities in the UAE in order to attract more female and male graduates from the talent base found in the country. And in response to the results from the 2011 GPTWI surveys, the company has stepped up communications as well as employee recognition efforts.  

Other specificities of the culture at PepsiCo include flexibility in time and vacation management, transparency, an entrepreneurial spirit, low social barriers, and a family atmosphere. 

Some of these elements are found internationally in the organization; others were nurtured locally, creating subtle differences in the feeling one gets at PepsiCo in the UAE when compared with offices of the corporation elsewhere, according to Zakaria who quips, “Everybody here speaks the same language, English and PepsiCo.”

Oh my God! – A vibrant new kid has moved into the best block in town. With an abbreviation that is practically irresistible to play with, the Omnicom Media Group MENA exudes an energetic flair of newness and infuses some fine extra scent into the Great Places To Work (GPTW) experience in the United Arab Emirates. That is quite a feat as the 10 Best Companies to work for in the UAE supply the interviewer with a collection of people with remarkable individualities, collaboration talents and action-charged characters. 

But then, OMG’s aptitude for novelty is not only because it is one of the two companies that made the still very young GPTW list for the first time in 2012, it is also the second runner up in the ranks of the Best Companies for Women in the UAE. The fresh feel of its culture thus testifies to the rejuvenating power which a professional equilibrium of the two genders brings to corporate leadership (to be fair, M-F collaboration in leadership is promising at several of the top ten companies). 

In its multinational identity, OMG is the media services arm of Omnicom Group, one of the world’s four supersized conglomerates in advertising, public relations, and communications planning. Omnicom reported $12.5 billion in worldwide revenue in 2010. At the end of January it was trading on the New York Stock Exchange with a market cap of $12.8 billion. 

Although OMG has been around for the better part of a decade as a holding for Omnicom’s four media buying and planning companies, and sits atop of one of six core activities at Omnicom, OMG is best known within the professional communications sphere. A testament to the company’s specialization is that they are not even covered by a separate entry in Wikipedia. 

That begs the question of why the company is attempting to gain exposure by entering into the Great Place to Work process. 

 “What we are getting out of our participation is naturally the knowledge that we are on our track, the ability of benchmarking ourselves in the market and the understanding of how we can improve further,” Elie Khouri, the chief executive of OMG Middle East and North Africa, shares with Executive.

 OMG is part of an industry with two preoccupations. The primary one is to plan, craft, and develop messages and marketing communication strategies for clients and to purchase advertising space in commercial news and entertainment media. The second is to reinvent themselves incessantly. 

It is a stressful, hyperactive business and one has to be cut out for it. That may go some way toward explaining why OMG in the UAE has the highest percentage of employees with less than two years of tenure among the top ten companies.   

From the vantage of the Great Place to Work Institute’s Culture Audit, an outstanding feature at OMG is a forum for brainstorming on solutions to life’s challenges, called The Circle of Excellence. What is special about this confidential forum is that members of the organization congregate to put their minds together to address issues effecting all areas of their life from the business-related to the personal and the family life with the objective to help themselves and their colleagues.  

Khouri underscores that this approach is not just some afterthought activity but rather a core competency in the workplace culture at OMG. According to him, the group’s robustness across its Middle East and North Africa operations is the “personal attention it gives to every employee, not only in relation to their job but also to their life and individual circumstances. We try to accompany them on their life journey on a continuous basis. If you don’t do that, you cannot get the best out of people working with you.”

A special aspect on the operational side of OMG when compared with the other top ten companies in the UAE is that it has to implement social team activities and assert corporate cultures for all four media service companies that work with distinct identities. “It is challenging,” Khouri says but adds that the group’s umbrella of values makes the task doable. “Each of the four companies has its own program but all operate and fit under the common umbrella of taking care of our people.”

As you have read the story to this comma, 33 characters have been captured and organized on imaginary paper by Microsoft Word, in the space of less than 10 seconds. Pausing for a minute to speculate how many ‘i’s have been dotted and ‘t’s have been crossed in the same 10 seconds globally on how many machines using MS Word, is an exercise in total futility as far as trying to make a reasonable guess.  

Even ‘Googling’ the question is completely useless. But mind-map even a vague image of the importance and global penetration of information and communications technology (ICT) devices in 2012 and of the role that Microsoft Corporation plays in this field, and it becomes clear that the company’s annual profits ($23.1 billion in FY 2011 ended last June), latest revenue ($20.9 billion in Q4 of 2011) and market cap ($243.9 billion on Jan 30, 2012) are mere shadows of what value, economic and social, this company actually has added to the global village since it was established in 1975.  

In the pantheon of modern economic deities, or idols as the case may be, last year Microsoft was ranked as the world’s ninth-most admired company by international human resource consultants Hay Group, and the Microsoft brand was assessed as the world’s fifth-most valuable in the BrandZ chart. 

Microsoft appeared in the Great Place to Work ranking for the first time in 1993. In October of last year, the company was feted as the world’s best multinational workplace in the first Great Place To Work Institute [GPTWI] list ranking only multinational corporations. The list’s achievement stats showed that Microsoft was recognized among the best workplaces in 26 countries under GPTWI coverage, or 58 percent of the countries where GPTWI operates. 

A matter of balance

Work-life balance at Microsoft UAE was the focal area of praise in the GPTWI 2012 culture audit spotlight on the company. The institute noted very favorably that the regional organization has created a tangible expression in which teams can capture principles for balanced living in a ‘Work-Life Balance Charter’, which is prepared and signed collectively. 

The headcount of Microsoft UAE is approaching 400, a drop in the bucket of the firm’s global workforce of more than 92,000. This, however, does not at all diminish the pride of the local organization as a part of the whole. 

As Microsoft Gulf General Manager Samer Abu Ltaif puts it: “We felt very good when Microsoft recently won the best [multinational] places to work, because the UAE was on the list and we felt that we contributed to winning that.” 

Microsoft gained top spot in the 2011 GPTW list, but the issue is not if the company comes in first this year, Abu Ltaif told Executive before the 2012 rankings are released. The issue is what input from the process he can gain to use in improving the workplace further, the manager elaborates. “My commitment is not to win awards. My commitment is for the people in the organization to feel that this is a great place to work, definitely, and that we are developing our people and are looked up to among all IT companies and companies in the region as pioneering in initiatives and as a talent magnet.”

Despite its global advantages in attracting talent, it is critical to the organization to be perceived locally as a great place to work, Abu Ltaif says. His role in this is to “create an environment where people want to come and make a difference” as well as giving them “an opportunity to develop their career and feel they are respected and trusted.”  

He and his leadership team in the Dubai office approach this task through both corporate-led and local programs. In examples for local initiatives, Microsoft Gulf has set up a concierge service and a valet service that liberates employees from worrying about their parking spots and helps staff cope with what Abu Ltaif concedes is a demanding workplace: “It is very difficult to work for MS if you don’t have passion for the technology and passion for our mission which is to enable people and businesses to realize their potential.”

What gives employees the greatest motivational impulses, however, are citizenship programs, where they directly witness the company’s positive impact in areas such as education and in places such as autism centers, Abu Ltaif says. “That sense of pride makes a huge difference for our people.”

Getting a good grip on FedEx is a challenge. First, there is the size: How do you gauge a mammoth venture whose presence propelled Memphis, Tennessee — the second city in the 17th most populous state of the United States — into the unlikely home of the world’s busiest cargo airport for eight of the past 10 years? Memphis, named after, of all places, ancient Egypt’s capital, anchors FedEx’s worldwide business of express shipping and freight operations, a logistics activity that is as mundane as it is important and gets spiced up by occasional but highly public relations-effective extracurricular activities, such as airlifting panda bears.

With global turnover approaching $40 billion in its fiscal year that ended in May 2011, FedEx as an economic power even exceeds the nominal gross domestic product of the smallest Gulf Cooperation Council economy, Bahrain. 

But neither size nor economic muscle explain why FedEx Express is top dog and king of the hill among the Top 10 Companies to Work for on the UAE 2012 list. In highlighting things that FedEx does right, the Great Place to Work Institute (GPTWI) named two aspects in the company’s culture, the corporate philosophy and order of priorities, known as people-service-profit (P-S-P), and the Purple Promise, an employee recognition scheme. 

Listening to David Ross, the senior vice president of FedEx Express for the Middle East, Indian Subcontinent and Africa, it seems that GPTWI has hit the nail on the head as far as identifying what FedEx managers think sets their company apart. 

“As a company with the people-service-profit philosophy we have a head start in GPTW, given that P-S-P was put in place by the chairman of FedEx when founding the company,” Ross tells Executive. 

Ross explains the Purple Promise by recounting the most recent story behind the awarding of one to a FedEx courier with FedEx Express UAE for “going above and beyond”. Last December, a courier, Ross says, found an expat lady’s purse with “considerable cash and all her cards and permits” on the sidewalk during his delivery work; he took the initiative to contact the lady and return her lost property. 

In his explanations of what makes FedEx perform as an extraordinary workplace, Ross emphasizes the conversion of policies and practices into a bona fide culture, meaning doing the right things not merely because of corporate policy but doing them “as part of our normal daily behavior. We see it as something that becomes behavioral through great leadership.” 

This culture entails being a people-first company as part of its nature and has grown from its American origins into a global phenomena, he enthuses. 

But the spread into a corporation with a headcount of some 290,000 is impossible without some snags and wrinkles. This truth was specifically impressed upon the masses of YouTube connoisseurs, also in December, when a video attracted eight- plus million views of a courier who “delivered” a computer monitor by throwing it over a fence and breaking it as the astounded recipient watched via his security camera. 

So what did FedEx do? According to Ross: “It was a bad thing to have happened but we stood up publicly and acknowledged that; and we are using this video internally as a tool for our growth into the future.”

Besides recognition schemes for positive reinforcement of its culture ing mistakes to learn and grow as an organization, development is fostered at FedEx in other notable ways, among them a tuition reimbursement program. Ross says the company allocates an amount of money for every employee, allowing its people educational pursuits that may help them grow and achieve and move forward in the organization.

How far can a new courier go? Ross, who noted earlier in his conversation with Executive that several C-level executives in FedEx Express had started at the bottom, answers quick as a flash, “He can become the CEO. All managers up to the CEO will tell you that anybody who puts their mind to it, works hard and gathers the right skill set, can grow through the organization.”

Merck Serono is a biopharmaceutical manufacturer ba-sed in Geneva, Switzerland. Its parent company, German firm Merck KgaA (Kommanditgesellschaft auf Aktien, a part privately held and part publicly traded company) is not just any pharmaceutical firm. With roots dating to the 17th century in the city of Darmstadt, capital of what was then a political entity called the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt under the Holy Roman Empire, the German Merck Group lays undisputed claim to being the world’s oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company.  

As the largest division in the Merck Group, Merck Serono was created in 2007 by acquisition. According to its website, it has 17,000 employees worldwide and in 2010 accounted for 5.8 billion euros ($7.7 billion) in the group’s revenues. The company is not to be confused with the US-based Merck & Co, a pharmaceutical firm of the same origins as Merck Group which is active in the Middle East as Merck Sharp & Dohme. 

Merck Serono serves the region with a team of about 270 employees of which about one third are working out of the Dubai office, says Dream Samir, managing director, Middle and Near East of Merck Serono Middle East FZ. The regional office relocated recently to premises in Dubai Healthcare City and is set to expand.

Besides sales and marketing of its medical products in the region, the company is active in clinical trials and also is engaged in major efforts in medical awareness raising, training, education and communication. This involves support programs with physicians and patients and important partnerships with ministries of health.  

The company, which regionally manufactures in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, is currently ranked the third-fastest growing pharmaceutical firm in the Middle East and North Africa among more than 100 firms, Samir tells Executive. 

The Great Place to Work Institute 2012 Top Companies report lauds the importance which Merck Serono puts on effective communication, mentioning its elected “Employee Council” with proportional representation of all employees. The council is empowered to present and discuss with senior management all issues brought up by employees. 

The 2011 Great Places To Work (GPTW) UAE benchmark report highlighted the company’s practices on employee recognition, communication and celebration of values-based action. 

Samir says the company has high marks on employee engagement, for which he cites the GPTW as well as other third-party surveys. “There is a lot of evidence that employees love their work” and engagement is “something we want to foster even more,” he points out. “The biggest opportunity that we have now is to bring this engagement to a larger group of people, which is obviously our stakeholders.”

As Samir describes it, the corporate environment is a main strength of the company. It is based on awareness of the need to avoid rigid structures and bring out the best in the company’s people by allowing them “to discover themselves, discover their strengths, and then to work with their strengths.” This means accepting that there might not be one single rigid solution for everything and giving people “the freedom to do it in their own way, but of course in a way that does not violate our system.”

Proper management of remuneration issues is required as a hygiene factor but the paycheck “is one of the lowest priorities in being a great place to work,” he says. “Communication and fair treatment is an area that every company needs to work on. If someone feels that he is not treated fairly and doesn’t get fair chances in promotions, nothing else matters. The paycheck will not matter if you feel mistreated.”  

At Merck Serono Middle East, the emphasis on a flexible work environment — supported by absence of steep hierarchies in the organization — ties in with a positive approach to principled competition. Differentiation is important especially for successful people, Samir emphasizes, and making the rules of the game very clear and encouraging staff to compete on performance, on behavior, on innovation and on collaboration, enables success through “a combination of a system that shows the proper balance between competition and collaboration and a management team that lives this.”    

Leadership and example at the head of the organization is the lynchpin in the whole structure. “The CEO not only sets the direction but also walks the talk — all the messages that the CEO sends all the time in his ways of decision making and leadership will always be seen by the employees.”