Products & Solutions

Letter from Dubai

A report by Regional Executive and General Manager Middle East North Africa, Jason Goddard
Jason Goddard, Regional Executive and General Manager Middle East North Africa

A few months ago no one would have predicted the widespread unrest in parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Rising food prices, young populations with high levels of unemployment, and the lack of democratic freedoms resulted in widespread anger at governments. A major factor in the rapid spread of popular uprisings and demonstrations was access to social media networks and the internet which helped create a “perfect storm” for events, whose speed surprised everyone.

To date there has been unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Oman and Libya – most have seen largely peaceful protests, while others have brought down leaders who have been in power for decades. Things have been very unpredictable to say the least and illustrate the value of a having a robust crisis plan and clear channels of communication.

Managing the crisis
Global WorkPlace Solutions (GWS) has a number of clients with operations in some of these countries, but by far the most affected country was Egypt where we have 43 staff and five global clients. On the first day of major unrest in Egypt we activated our Crisis Management Plan and set up a steering group, which comprised in-country account managers, client management teams, with support from the GWS headquarters and the Johnson Controls security team. After assessing the situation we were quick to repatriate the one non-Egyptian national that we had in the country.

Of course, when there’s such civil unrest the principal concern is the safety and welfare of employees, so management’s focus has to be on what can be done to support them. The second priority is to make sure that you can react as quickly as possible when things improve to get businesses back to normal. To do both, accurate information on what is happening is absolutely essential.

Daily contact with employees
Due to reports of looting and violence in Cairo, many staff, understandably, didn’t want to leave home. We held daily calls with local teams to offer employees support and advice based on reports from our security intelligence provider, International SOS, Johnson Controls security and what was being reported in the media. However, we also used these daily calls to collect information from employees on what was happening on the ground at a local level. We held these calls on landlines as there were occasional problems with mobile networks. From these daily calls we conducted a daily risk assessment of each customer site we supported, as well as a risk assessment of each individual employee based on where they lived, how they got to work and whether they travelled to work alone or in a group. Some of our employees would have had to travel near to the centre of the protests in Tahrir Square to get to work, which was obviously potentially dangerous.

We didn’t allow anyone to return to work until we were absolutely sure that it was safe to do so. Again, these decisions were taken on a case-by-case basis, depending on the local and external information that we had gathered. For example, we offered cars to take people to work to be sure that they would be safe.

Unlike many other businesses, we had to manage our response on two levels, firstly how we responded as a business in our own right and, secondly, the support our management teams provided to clients' contingency plans, often doing both simultaneously. The experience of dealing with the crisis in Egypt taught me the value of working with clients on a local and global level, the wider Johnson Controls security, legal and operations departments and other Johnson Controls businesses to pool quality information to make the right decisions to keep those affected away from harm.

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