The UAE new weekend

The United Arab Emirates announced  onTuesday it will move its weekends to Saturday and Sunday at the start of the new year. The gulf state has long observed a Friday-Saturday weekend.

The move comes as the oil-rich country looks to strengthen its tourist appeal and attract international business while keeping up with mounting competition from neighboring Saudi Arabia.

#UAE announces today that it will transition to a four and a half day working week, with Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday forming the new weekend.

All Federal government departments will move to the new weekend from January 1, 2022. pic.twitter.com/tQoa22pai9

— UAEGOV (@UAEmediaoffice) December 7, 2021

The announcement was published onTuesday by state news agency WAM.

ABU DHABI, 7th December, 2021 (WAM) -- The UAE Government will adopt a new four and a half day working week, effective from 1st January, 2022.

The move applies to Federal government entities and comes alongside new working hours, with Monday to Thursday workdays now starting at 7:30 am and ending at 3:30 pm, and Friday working hours from 7:30 am - 12:00 pm.

Government staff will have the flexibility to make arrangements to work from home on Fridays, as well as to arrange their working hours on a flexi-time basis.

The UAE is the first nation in the world to introduce a national working week shorter than the global five-day week.

The extended weekend is part of the UAE government’s efforts to boost work-life balance and enhance social wellbeing, while increasing performance to advance the UAE’s economic competitiveness.

Adopting an agile working system will enable the UAE to rapidly respond to emerging changes and enhance wellbeing in the workplace.

From an economic perspective, the new working week will better align the UAE with global markets, reflecting the country’s strategic status on the global economic map. It will ensure smooth financial, trade and economic transactions with countries that follow a Saturday/Sunday weekend, facilitating stronger international business links and opportunities for thousands of UAE-based and multinational companies.

The new working week will also bring the UAE’s financial sector into closer alignment with global real-time trading and communications-based transactions such as those driving global stock markets, banks and financial institutions. The move will boost trading opportunities and add to the flexible, secure and enjoyable lifestyle the UAE offers to its citizens and residents.

The Federal Authority for Government Human Resources proposed the new workweek following comprehensive benchmarking and feasibility studies reflecting potential impacts of the move on the economy, social and family ties and the overall wellbeing of people in the UAE.

From The Washington Post and Wam (edited)

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A pre-holiday Zoom call: 900 people were fired

 

About 900 employees of real estate company Better.com were asked to attend a Zoom call on Wednesday. But rather than offering a holiday message to workers, CEO Vishal Garg delivered a 3-minute speech informing attendees they were "terminated effectively immediately."

He said staff performance and productivity, and market changes lay behind the mass-firing of what he said was 15% of Better.com's workforce. However, he did not mention the $750m cash infusion Better.com received last week from Softbank, the Japanese firm and key investor.

Garg founded Better.com in 2016 with the mission of simplifying the mortgage-buying process

Better is now in the process of going public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in a deal that would value the company at about $7 billion.

Soon after the mass layoff last week, Garg held a separate phone call with the remaining staff in which he blamed himself for managerial problems. "Today, we acknowledge that we overhired and hired the wrong people, and in doing that, we failed," Garg said, according to Insider. "I failed. I was not disciplined over the last 18 months.”

It is hard to say whether Garg is a good leader. One of Garg’s emails to his employees was widely criticised for its “rude" nature. It said “You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and… DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”

There's no great way to lay people off, but there's a way to do it and this wasn’t it.

First, there’s the timing: three weeks before Christmas. And then the whole thing was handled over Zoom. Maybe that was unavoidable, but the process was made even less personal by having everyone crammed into one virtual room for a single, brief meeting.

It could harm the firm as existing employees will look to how the company treats people as a signal to how it will treat them in the future.

Many customers or potential customers are probably thinking: 'Gee, if they treat their employees this way I wonder how they treat their customers?'."

Sometimes bad press is just bad press. And by carrying out one of the laziest, worst-timed layoffs ever, Better.com's executives have everyone talking about their company for all the wrong reasons.

From CBSNews (edited)

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Twitter’s new CEO

Twitter’s new chief executive and former chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal, announced a major reorganization of the company Friday, putting his stamp on the organization following the sudden departure of co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey earlier this week.

The shake-up will bring together employees previously divided by job function — such as engineering, design and product development — on teams organized by what they’re working on, such as consumer product, revenue and core tech.

In a companywide email, Agrawal said that he will focus on “clear decision-making, increased accountability, and faster execution,” and added he was “making a number of organizational and leadership changes to best position us to achieve our goals. … We’ve all discussed the critical need for more operational rigor and it must start from the top.”

The reorganization is the first clear sign that Twitter’s new leader intends to overhaul a culture that has been considered slow to innovate and face internal conflict.

Dorsey, who announced his resignation from Twitter unexpectedly on Monday, was viewed by many as a hands-off leader. He had faced pressure to resign from investors and was criticized, along with the leaders of other social media companies, for failing to control the spread of misinformation and other harmful content.

Agrawal, 37, was chosen unanimously to succeed Dorsey by Twitter’s board of directors. He has an engineering background and rose through the ranks over a decade at Twitter. He is tasked with making Twitter a faster-paced company but will also face intense scrutiny from lawmakers intent on regulating social media.

Dorsey will continue to remain CEO of Square, which he renamed Block this week to highlight a focus on cryptocurrency. Despite his absences, he was known as a charismatic and visionary leader who represented the company during years of controversies over bullying and harassment. He was the first leader of a tech company to limit the speech of President Donald Trump when the company slapped a warning label over his tweets last year.

 

From The WashingtonPost (edited)

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