By Dr Farah Sleiman

Sir Richard Branson once said : “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients” and he is the one that also said that “your employees are your real competitive edge.” I would like here to add that they are your only sustainable competitive edge because each one of them is a unique combination of skills, dreams, aspirations and energy/soul sets, and this nobody can copy in a million years. I am writing this piece in light of the as always avant-gardist decision our beloved UAE government took to make the work week 4.5 days with the possibility of working the half of Fridays altogether from home, this decision comes as part of an overarching care the UAE government has always had for the UAE people wellbeing after all this is the only country in the world where the government has in place a People Happiness Strategy and a goal to make Dubai the happiest city in the world with clear KPIs and a clear progress monitoring system across all government touchpoints with the public.

It is still not very clear whether the private sector will follow this visionary approach yet, thus my article today is addressed to the private corporations, and I would like to tell them there are many lessons for you to learn here, the first one being that the era of corporate despotism is over. Productivity has nothing to do with the numbers of hours you work in and everything to do with how you are working and where and in terms of quality of output and creativity, the golden rule to keep in mind is “less is more”. 

The second lesson is that it is very sad to see that it took a global pandemic that lasted over 2 years with millions of deaths and countless disabilities and economic losses for the corporate world to drop the slavery 9 to 6 in office regimen it had in place and discover the remote work system even though this discovery didn’t stem from any enlightenment or concern for employees wellbeing but rather a compulsory measure imposed by the public health authorities. Whether the shift to remote and flexiwork will lead to a real shift of the corporate world view of its responsibility and contribution to the employees mental health and quality of life remains a big question. 

But I am here to tell you this , if you are an entrepreneur or a CEO you are responsible for your people not only income but more importantly you are the guardian of the integrity of their heart and soul. Yes you heard me, the integrity of their heart and soul.If your people are getting sick often, burned out or are working overtime, it means that you, yes you , has failed as a leader. Yes you failed because through what you are doing or not doing you have created a toxic culture of presenteeism where people staying after hours gets the favor of the boss and are perceived as “hard workers”. That’s a leadership failure but it is also an operational failure because if work is planned properly with the right resources in place and the execution is high quality , there is no reason to work overtime. So working overtime is either a failure of planning or a failure of execution. If you had good planning skills , a task allocated for one person should be planned based on the assumption of an 8h workday, this means that an employee with the suitable skills and know-how required to perform the task should not have to stay one minute after 6pm. If he finds himself compelled to work overtime it means you are giving him a workload that should be divided on more than one person, very short-sighted way to increase your margin on the short run, on the long run this is higher recruitment cost or sick leaves or lower quality output. This is how you lose your top Brains and Hearts. There is a whole body of knowledge called work medicine that studies people performance proportionally to the number of hours they put in their jobs and the stats are very clear there is no creativity and problem solving left beyond 8 h of work, the body gets exhausted and starts pumping cortisol and under this hormonal regimen, you are in fight-orflight mode, prefrontal cortex shuts down and you have the IQ of a reptile.

Now let us look at the second kind of failure that leads to working overtime; It is failure in execution, either you are not giving your employee all the tools and resources to complete his work in a timely manner or simply you have placed the wrong person on this task, he doesn’t really know how to do it and he is struggling left and right wasting a lot of time trying to catch up on his learning curve, this is also a way to break someone spirit and heart, he is running, running, running, but whatever he does its not enough. Simply put, you are setting him up to fail. Done over a period of time this leads to learned helplessness. This is when you take out someone’s passion for his job, congratulations you have simply just created a zombie. My take home message to all CEOs at the end of this article is this:

• Let your employees work from wherever they want as long as they deliver the required work on time and up to required standards why would you care if they are sitting on a tree in the middle of the jungle, they didn’t sell you their soul when they signed on this employment contract, stop acting like their jailer.
• Reconsider your planning, one man day means an 8h shift with two breaks, design your timeline and deadlines accordingly.
• Put the right person in the right place and give him all the tools to succeed
• Finally reward creativity, critical thinking and out-of-the box problem solving not “sucking up to the boss” behavior other wise you will end up with an army of “yes sir”.