|
Yesterday, at the FORBES conference, (which is brilliant BTW, and if you’re missing out, you’re loser), Qatar’s FM hinted that Qatar is looking into changing visa / sponsorship laws.
For those of you who don’t live in Qatar, here, like in all other Gulf Arabian countries, your residency visa is not issued by the Country – it is rather “sponsored” by your company. In reality, this means that you can’t resign and get a better job without your company giving you a “release”. Your company can even ban you from working in Qatar for a long period.
I certainly support this decision. Qatar’s has been a leader in the Gulf for quite some time in many areas, and it’s a time now to get the visa regime in line with the rest of the world. Present system simply gives companies waay too much power over employees and one could argue that it is even out of line with the Human Rights policies. Every expat I know who’s been in the business in Qatar for a while will tell you these horror stories of foreigners starting up businesses with Qataris only to be kicked out and banned from the country by their partner. Of course, this doesn’t bode well for Qatar’s image in the world.
Most employers will argue against change, citing arguments that it is very, very difficult and expensive to recruit in Qatar (and therefore they don’t want their employees leaving), and that’s true, but this is your typical “chicken-egg” situation. It is difficult to recruit PRECISELY BECAUSE of the sponsorship laws, and a non-existent job market…
In our company, we never used our power over employees this way. We aim to create great working experience, friendly and fun atmosphere, respect for our employees work, and I think we are succeeding. And if someone wants to leave to get few pennies more somewhere else, well we wish him/her good luck…
Of course, as soon as this new de-regulation starts, expect a rush of headhunters to siege your employees. There’ll be turmoil. There’ll be disruptions in operation. But this is progress, and Darwinian (or Adam Smith’s, whichever you prefer) system will ultimately help Qatar’s economy become better.
Some companies in Qatar already use this “creative” recruitment policies, and in most cases it is for their loss, actually. Right now, talk of the town is this large construction company who’s building an island (wink wink). They’ve been a big mess with their marketing effort since they started, changing Agencies every few months, spending ridicilous ammounts of money on inconsistent campaigns, installing new marketing personnel weekly etc (and no, I’m not talking about Qatar Airways, he, he). This Company’s new strategy now is to grab employees of marketing companies they’re dealing with and attempt to do the job by themselves. Talk about “soukh” mentality in a multi-billion dollar project! First, they employed account manager of Advertising Agency they negotiated with for a long time, and now, after negotiating with the (different) production company for months and months about creating a documentary video, they’ve recruited their main cameraman. Of course, this is silly – one account manager can’t create a campaign, you need an Agency for that, and one cameraman can’t create a video – that is a team effort, but you get the picture… Expect a lot of this once the de-regulation kicks in...
|
