Don’t like handcuffs ? Join Netflix !

Reed Hastings is the co-founder and CEO of Netflix, which provides live streaming TV and video shows from the internet on a monthly subscription basis in the USA, Canada, UK and Ireland. A great concept and one that led to the ultimate doom of the local video/DVD rental business (think Blockbusters). In How to set…

Two Excel functions to save time in compensation files

Two functions in Excel can help you save time when performing analyses on big compensation files : conditional formatting and sorting. Imagine you have big file with salary information and you want to find out who are the lowest paid of managers in the organisation. But titles are all over the place, not specifically tied…

A view on emiratisation from the Abu Dhabi Tawteen Council

The Abu Dhabi Tawteen Council (ADTC) recently visited an internal Emiratisation Summit that was held at my company for us and the HR representatives of our assets. As per the official Abu Dhabi government website, “ADTC spearheads the efforts of the Abu Dhabi government in sustainable Emirati workforce development. It is dedicated to meet the…

3 factors influencing the promotion rate for your organisation

As we got into salary review time or mid-year reviews, colleagues have asked me, almost every year, the same question about the promotion rate : “What is a reasonable benchmark for the number of employees to be promoted each year ?” Now, bear with me please because my answer is one that usually is not…

A double celebration

Today is special for 2 reasons : first, it’s my birthday and I have actually taken the day off. I’m treating myself to a long week-end in Dubai at the Raffles hotel, and intend to fully enjoy their exceptional spa treatments 🙂 … And second, this my 100th blog post. A big milestone ! When I started…

An update on the project on expat retirement schemes in the UAE

The day before the 2012 ASHRM conference officially started last week, I was fortunate to be invited at the inaugural breakfast for the event. Besides the usual networking with a small group of select participants, we were given two presentations, one by Mercer (the results of a survey they specially performed for the conference), and…

Feedback from the Arabian Society for HR Management (ASHRM) conference 2012

I was kindly invited to attend the 11th International Conference and Exhibition from ASHRM (Arabian Society for Human Resource Management) that took place last week in Abu Dhabi. It was my first time at that conference and I felt it was a different kind of conference to the ones I usually attend in the region.…