What Dubai bosses look for: Long hours or efficiency?

It’s 6.30 pm at the office. You’ve been working hard and fast and have accomplished your tasks for the day. No surprise, you now want to go back home. But there are other people who are still glued to their computer screen. What should you do? Maybe wait for another hour or so, just surfing the Internet or checking e-mails.

After all, you don’t want to stand out as the office slacker.

This is a very common situation and unfortunately employees often feel that being efficient in their work may not be really rewarding. “What matters is for how long you sit in the office,” said an accountant at a multinational company. “My office is until 5.30 pm and I got up to go home. After two days my boss came up to me and said it was just afternoon. I now sit for another one hour, not doing anything really worthwhile but making sure that I’m noticed as a hard-working and dependable person,” he added.

There may be many such cases but this is not what bosses want in Dubai, say experts in the recruitment industry. A good company and a good boss will look for the quality and quantity of work done by an employee and not the number of hours spent at the desk.

“Productivity is what matters most to employers. In terms of work schedule, more and more companies across the region are offering a larger margin of flexibility to their employees to improve their holistic well-being and thus increase their productivity and efficiency,” Lama Ataya, CMO, Bayt.com told Emirates 24|7.

According to Konstantina Sakellariou, Partner, Marketing & Operations Director at Stanton Chase, efficient employees end up working long hours. “All bosses want efficiency.  The efficient people usually work long hours, because they end up doing many things (and not because a task takes them long to complete).  Bosses are not fooled by long hours that do not produce results,” she said.

An increasing number of employees put in longer hours especially after the recession as many of them had taken on added responsibility.

“According to a survey of Dubai CFOs, more than eight in 10 (84 per cent) indicate that their employees work longer than their contracted hours at least once a week, and one in four (24 per cent) work overtime every day. Not surprisingly, that when asked what has contributed to their company becoming more productive than one year ago, 39 per cent said that staff are doing more with existing resources. It appears that Dubai workers continue to work hard and this may be contributing toward greater organisational growth. It is important for employers to realise, however, that this cannot go on indefinitely and that employees need help managing rising workloads and growth initiatives. Fortunately, increased hiring in Dubai will likely spell relief for many workers,” explained Gareth El Mettouri, Associate Director at Robert Half International.

Many private sector employees often talk about how tired they are at the end of the day. “I’m supposed to work for 8 hours a day but 10 hours is the norm. I feel totally exhausted by the time I reach home,” lamented a public relations executive working in Jumeriah Lake Towers, without wishing to be named.

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