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.”

Being cryptic and brief was quite common when naming startup companies in the United States 30 or 40 years ago. When two American engineers created a venture for production of computer memory boards in 1979, they combined their initials and a third letter into EMC Corporation, garnished it with a visual reference to Einstein’s relativity formula and grew it into a specialist information technology (IT) company under a cloak of mild obscurity, known best among true nerds and corporate IT managers.   

Today, the company boasts $20 billion in consolidated revenue with double-digit growth in 2011 driven by demand for its data storage, information management and security and cloud computing products. It has 48,500 employees worldwide and spent 11 percent of last year’s consolidated revenue on research and development, according to results announced last month.    

In 1999, EMC set up its first office in the Middle East in the United Arab Emirates with a tiny team and has grown to about 550 employees in 17 offices around the region, plus 250 to 300 engineers based in Cairo, says Wael el-Nadi, the EMC technology solutions director for Turkey, Emerging Africa and the Middle East. 

Aspects that impressed the Great Place to Work Institute in the EMC culture audit were the company’s initiatives and readiness to exceed legal requirements in developing a caring culture, granting time off for paternity and marriage as well as compassionate leave and extended holiday leaves. 

As Nadi describes it to Executive, the spirit motivating EMC’s care of its employees is one of mutuality. The firm is responsive to people’s requests for time off whenever that is needed and goes beyond the mandates of the UAE labor law in providing extra vacation during the Eid periods and in special situations, because “on the other side of the coin we expect our employees to work harder than the standard.”

The reason why EMC’s Dubai-based organization participated in the 2012 GPTW list process was a sense of obligation to staff.  “We believe we owe this to the employees, because we are a great place to work and we believe it is good to share the success,” Nadi explains. 

Success is perhaps the biggest driver in making the UAE and regional teams proud of what they do and binding them to the company — according to Nadi, the operation is the highest-growth EMC office in percentage terms worldwide. “This by itself makes the office attractive because people join a successful team.”

He cites EMC’s very low employee turnover as indicative of pride and loyalty: “It is part of the ego of a normal individual to be proud of it if you work for a good company.” In corporation-wide internal employee feedback, the regional organization usually gets strong marks on vision and leadership, he adds. “Management is accessible and easy to approach and one can raise any concern and so on; thus we score very high when it comes to leadership and vision. When it comes to rewards, here in this region we know that we are not the highest but also not the lowest.”

In pursuit of its human capital growth plans, EMC has recently set up an undergraduate curriculum with universities in the UAE which the company expects will unleash much potential for local recruitment. This program ties in with an “associate program” that grooms graduates with degrees in disciplines such as computer engineering and business administration for management roles. Leadership training for high-potential employees in a joint program with EMC’s European division is another part of the formula. 

EMC engages in a variety of corporate citizenship activities and has implemented corporate social responsibility programs in Pakistan, Egypt, and the UAE. 

Nadi tells Executive of strong territorial expansion that has been managed from the regional office in Dubai and he is highly confident that the organization based here will increasingly contribute to global results. At present, the regional organization keeps some 4,000 people, including employees and their dependents, in bread and roses. He says, “We consider this our big family and this is a big responsibility. That is why we always say that we have to maintain our success.”

Dulsco, the Dubai-based provider of human resources and waste management services, is the largest and oldest local company in the Top Companies to Work for in the United Arab Emirates, and it has succeeded not only to make the Great Places To Work (GPTW) list for the second year running but also improved its standing in the list from 2011. 

Acting behind the scenes as a quasi-invisible human resources back office to a wide range of enterprises, the company provides manpower support to industries that are essential for the UAE’s economic performance, such as transport and logistics and also in sectors that are core to the international attractiveness of the Emirates, such as event organizers and hospitality operators. Its staff profiles range from drivers and machinery operators to clerical workers and recruitment consultants. In the area of waste management, the company provides general and specialized cleaning, collection and related services as well as low-tech and high-tech equipment. 

As a privately held company, it does not publish results and the primary testimonies to its business acumen are its record of 77 years of continuous operations and its staff size of more than 5,300, approximately two thirds of which are part of the Human Resources division. The company has a joint-venture operation for manpower and waste management services in Qatar and dispatches roving staff to safety-tested locations and sites on specific projects and vessels beyond the borders of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Homegrown and without the human capital development processes and resources that a multinational firm or foreign corporate parents can deliver to their UAE units, Dulsco invested itself in the GPTW process from its internal resources.

At the core of any business is the human being. Due to the nature of the company’s activity with many physically demanding work roles and occupations, caring for its employees means for Dulsco to care for the safety and wellbeing of a mainly expatriate, male workforce.  

Incentive to care

“If you don’t invest in your employee, the employee will not care about his work. When, however, you plan a career for him and take care of safety and provide him with help and all that comes with it, you are transparent to him. When everything is clear in this way, he will be motivated to work for such a company,” Dulsco Chairman Abdul Aziz Mohammad Khan Abdulla tells Executive. 

As he conveys the Dulsco story, it becomes evident that the tradition of caring goes back to the company’s formation with stevedoring services. It was years before port facilities were created, and so ships would load and unload at an anchorage. It was also a long time until insurance companies would start offering their services. From those early days on, the company made it a policy that a worker who was injured or unable to work will get paid until he is healthy and able to work again.  

“So when the ports were built and insurance was introduced, we were way ahead of the other companies in providing safety and benefits as part of the corporate work policies,” Abdul Aziz says. 

People before profits

The practice was applied throughout the company’s growth. During the war in Iraq, there were inquiries to send crews to work at an oil loading terminal outside of the war zone with the promise of substantial premiums added to the normal wages, but Dulsco insisted firstly on the security of its employees and did not outsource the workforce. According to Abdul Aziz, “It is not just about money. It is safety first; this is what we believe in and we value human life more than money.” 

In its appraisal, the GPTWI 2012 Culture Audit commends Dulsco for its commitment to communications and active listening to employees. The report highlights the company’s facilities for two-way and down-up communication between employees and management, which include an open-door and ‘open office’ model, plus suggestion boxes in every location and department. 

Other Dulsco assets in being a great place to work for its employees include quality housing, sports facilities and a clinic as well as soft assets like celebratory and entertainment events that are tailored to the hearts of the employee base. “Don’t forget that these people are deprived of being with their families for two years and so you need to create the ‘home-style’ atmosphere, have functions and entertainment,” Abdul Aziz explains and sums the Dulsco culture up in saying, “We run this business as a family business.”

Rooted with one leg in technology and with one leg in services, Bayt.com stands with a well-established reputation as a leading authority in the region on all questions related to jobs. The company’s core activity is the provision of an internet-based marketplace connecting global job seekers and Middle East-based employers. The company has also leveraged its wealth in interaction with job seekers into an auxiliary career services business and into research activities.

Revenue generation at Bayt.com is based on fees that employers pay for posting job offers. But as the company does not collect fees for employment agreements emanating from usage of their site, Bayt.com cannot provide information on the number of contracts reached on the marketplace each year. However, the number of registered users is reported to be above 7 million and growing and the number of organizations that post employment offers is cited as 40,000.

There is money in the employment marketplace for Bayt.com and the firm has reached profitability within a relatively short time from its creation in 1998, according to chief executive Rabea Ataya. Yet it nurtures an approach to profits that differs from most companies. 

Every year Bayt.com sets a profitability target which is kept at a ‘low-level’; any profit exceeding the targeted margin will be reinvested into the team, Ataya tells Executive. “The company is willing to trade off profitability to achieve gains in how recognized, respected, and admired it is. We are far more focused on touching people’s lives than we are on profitability,” he says.

The organization’s employee-centric culture is cited by the Great Place to Work Institute (GPTWI) as an outstanding feature in the culture audit evaluation for the 2012 Best Companies to work for in the UAE list. As an example, GPTWI mentions daily training sessions prepared by team members and shared across the company’s locations. 

Based on the trust-index survey responses of Bayt.com employees and GPTWI’s culture audit, Bayt.com retained the same position in the 2012 and 2011 best companies lists. For Ataya, the repeated success in the GPTW process is “one of those feathers in our cap that we value with the greatest amount of pride,” he beams. 

Every person joining the Bayt.com team is tuned in to the company’s vision, which Ataya says is “about trying to build a Middle Eastern institution that is globally recognized and respected; and the way we hope to build that is by empowering people to lead better lives.”

The participation in the first GPTW process helped the company in understanding areas in which Bayt.com could further develop its strengths in 2011 and remedy weaknesses that it was not previously aware of. 

Gaps between responses by managers and junior employees to some trust index questions showed that while managers were well aware of the organization’s values and focus on maximizing Bayt.com’s role in improving people’s lives while maintaining profitability, employees were not made equally aware of these values and approaches. As one of the results of the GPTW participation, Bayt.com management increased efforts to enhance internal communications and explain these approaches more deeply.  

In other aspects of its employee focus, Bayt.com supports wellness-orientated lifestyles among its team members through initiatives such as providing baskets of fresh fruit in all pantries. Other sponsored activities throughout the year include team sports and lunch sessions in which the company invites speakers to address “topics that relate to improving people’s general lifestyle and quality of living,” Ataya says.

Ataya considers very steep hierarchical structures to be a hinderance to forming creative environments. Based on the realization of how important his sense of freedom while at work is for his own wellbeing, he made it a priority to give people in the organization the chance to replicate the same experience in their own working lives, saying: “The single most important thing that I can impart on the organization is letting people have that freedom.”

Alignment with the culture is a high priority in selecting employees and Ataya is confident that most Bayt.com workers are “seeking to live toward realizing our values. In all relationships with clients and employees and job seekers, we try to leave a positive impact on their lives.”