What 1,565 people in the region think about work today

Organisations need a strong and capable workforce in order to grow. In practical terms, that means fostering organisational transparency, enhancing workers’ skills, improving productivity and taking steps to retain top talent. Across our region, organisations are responding by upskilling employees to close the skills gap and by taking greater care of their mental and physical wellbeing. Employers are looking at new ways to build trust and retain employees, acknowledging that ways of working and people’s expectations about the working environment have changed forever.

For the third year running, we have captured the sentiments of the workforce across the region in our Middle East Hopes & Fears Survey. From 52,000 respondents across 44 countries and territories, we focus here on the findings from 1,565 workers.

We have identified six key themes emerging from our survey results. These are around – encouraging conversations at work, designing retention strategies, meeting societal goals, and adapting hybrid work models.

Younger employees have a stronger preference for full-time remote and hybrid working arrangements

Coming out of the pandemic, 63% of respondents said they were capable of performing their job remotely. Yet almost three out of 10 (28%), more than double the global average, said they were working full-time in-person, highlighting the complexity of adjusting work models to suit all employees.

The potential mismatch between employees’ and employers’ expectations is evident in the Middle East, where 31% of employees surveyed, compared with 18% globally, said their companies wanted them to work full-time in-person. Across all demographics, only 23% stated that this was their preferred method of working.

Furthermore, the younger the workforce, the stronger the preference for hybrid or fully remote working models. For example, 43% of Gen Z respondents in the Middle East preferred a remote or mostly remote full-time arrangement, with only 15% opting for full-time working in the office or other workplaces.

However, the value of a face-to-face presence is still felt in our region, as respondents who work full-time in-person were least likely to feel overlooked for career advancement. Employers need to address this gap in remote working preferences, while considering how to manage and fairly recognise their workforce in an increasingly hybrid world.

Employees feel comfortable discussing societal and contemporary topics

In line with their global counterparts, 86% of all respondents in the Middle East had conversations with other employees about societal and contemporary issues on occasion, allowing them to better understand their colleagues (43%) and create a more open and inclusive work environment (36%). Furthermore, having these conversations made employees in the region feel more confident in sharing their views (37% vs 27% globally), and the impacts of having these discussions in the workplace were twice as likely to be positive than negative.

Findings from last year’s Middle East Hopes & Fears Survey indicated that many organisations were receptive to genuine, fully inclusive conversations about how to build more diverse and purpose-led workplaces.

Employers are providing more support in the areas of Social and Governance

In this context, it is worth noting that on ESG issues, employees in the Middle East felt they were given more support and resources with regard to governance and social matters, in areas such as protecting company and customer data, diversity and inclusion and wellbeing, than on environmental matters. It is relevant that, according to this year’s Middle East CEO Survey, only 5% of business leaders in the region have committed to Net Zero targets.

To address skills shortages, many employers are focusing on internal measures

Some 75% of the employees surveyed in Kuwait, 60% in Qatar, 58% in Saudi Arabia and 46% in the UAE believed their country had a shortage of people with specialised skills. However, respondents in the region were more confident than the global survey average (47% vs 40% globally) that their employers were prioritising upskilling.

It is also encouraging that 38% of respondents in the Middle East, slightly more than the global average, said their companies had increased salaries as a retention strategy to retain skilled workers. This may reflect the increasing tendency of employers, especially in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to raise salaries rather than hire scarce and therefore expensive foreign talent to address skills and labour shortages. 

Against this background, 32% of employees in the Middle East said their companies were using technology to automate and upgrade the workplace, slightly more than the global survey average, while 41% compared with 30% globally were worried about their jobs being replaced by new technologies over the next three years. It is therefore concerning that 53% of respondents in the region (vs 40% globally) reported that there were limited opportunities to learn from colleagues with advanced technical or digital skills. 

Clearly employers in the Middle East, like their global counterparts, need to implement new technologies judiciously, remaining sensitive to these anxieties. The best way to resolve them is to build loyalty and trust by investing in upskilling programmes, for which there will be no shortage of participants. Any employer who is in doubt should take on board the following finding: more than 60% of respondents in the Middle East said some kind of specialist training was a necessity in their jobs, substantially higher than the global average (48%).

Employees are considering new opportunities

30% of respondents in the Middle East said they were extremely or very likely to look for a new job in the next year, a considerably higher proportion than the global survey average (19%). When we looked closer at the data on employees who said they were extremely or very likely to look for another job, we found this was particularly true of Gen Z and millennials across the region.

As noted above, the region’s rapid tech-driven transformation helps account for the greater mobility of younger workers, with vacancies abounding for employees with the right digital skills. On a personal level, popular reasons for wishing to seek pastures new include job fulfilment and the opportunity to be themselves at work.

It is notable that wellbeing at work matters more to Middle East respondents, compared with the survey as a whole; 35% thought it was ‘extremely important’ (vs 24% globally). At the same time, employees in the region were generally more ambitious than their international peers, with 35% saying that career advancement was ‘extremely important’, compared with a survey average of 22%.