The Glowork HR Innovation Summit held in the Saudi capital brought together human resources professionals to share their experiences and provide guidance to over 120 participants from all over the Kingdom and other countries.
The two-day event was held at the Narcissus Hotel Sunday and Monday.
Khalid Al-Khudair, CEO of Glowork, noted that Glowork is a social enterprise that has created thousands of jobs for women, including 70 female employees in their own firm.
Nawaf Dhubaib, human resource director at Rawabi Holding group, was the keynote speaker at the summit. He stressed the need to innovate as the labor market is changing due to new legislation being amended while new fees are being imposed.
“These are game changers, so HR needs to innovate to survive,” he told participants, most of whom were women.
“We need to come up with solutions which have not been tried before as we go into uncharted territory.”
Dhubaib, who has a aster’s degree in human resources management from the University of Melbourne, cited three strategies for business to succeed: Operational excellence, product innovation and customer intimacy.
He quoted McDonald’s as a company that exemplifies operational excellence. “It is following the strategy of value proposition, which adheres to ‘We do things this way.’ This means it strictly enforces HR policy in terms of attendance and procedure compliance in, for example, working in the kitchen.”
“If the procedure says you have to flip the burger three times, you have to follow this — neither twice nor four times. Another example is Fedex, which follows the same strategy,” he said.
He added, “The value proposition is ‘We’ll do things the new way’ like what Apple did when it introduced the iPhone or 3M, when it adopted the ‘Post-it’ note.”
“What they did was innovation,” said Dhubaib, who has worked with various multinational companies where he was involved in technology implementations.
“Companies focus on the customers in terms of trying to understand what they need in the future. So we measure the performance of the employee by the customers’ retention rate,” he said.

Source: Arab News