Thought leadership | Embedding and developing cultural unity across a diverse workforce

Culture and belonging: a business issue

The UAE has built one of the most internationally diverse labour markets in the world. With more than 200 nationalities represented and expatriates accounting for the majority of the workforce, organisations operate in environments where cultural difference is constant and embedded across every level of the organisation.

Alongside this diversity, the UAE is advancing decisive national workforce agendas. Emiratisation continues to reshape hiring, development and leadership pipelines, particularly in the private sector. As a result, organisations are required to integrate national talent priorities while sustaining performance across globally sourced teams. This is not a cultural challenge in isolation; it is a structural leadership reality.

In this context, belonging becomes a business issue. Alignment, trust, and execution increasingly depend on leaders' ability to work across cultural expectations, communicate with consistency and create shared standards of contribution and behaviour. The question is not whether teams are diverse, but whether leadership practices are sufficiently mature to convert diversity into coherence and results.

This interview takes place during a period of heightened regional and geopolitical sensitivity, when external events can influence how employees experience work and leadership. The focus of the discussion is practical and forward‑looking: how leaders in the UAE are sustaining unity, confidence and performance in multicultural teams, and which behaviours and organisational choices are proving effective in this environment.

Organisational culture integration

Q. The UAE is accelerating nationalisation while relying on one of the most global workforces in the world. From what you've seen, what determines whether this moment produces genuine unity or quietly entrenched parallel cultures? 

Where I’ve seen it work well is where organisations take a much more strategic, L&D-led approach. When the organisation has the leadership capability and L&D strategy to translate that diversity into aligned execution, they recognise that working in a multicultural, nationalisation-driven environment is a skill, not an assumption. They role model clarity and performance alignment, leadership capability, and workforce capability - and define clearly what success looks like and how performance is measured.

Where I’ve tended to see it be a little fragmented is when the organisation treats nationalisation as a quota to fulfil or a capability builder. This is when parallel cultures emerge, leaving expectations open to interpretation across the different cultural groups. That’s when you start to see informal in-groups forming, different standards of performance and communication and ultimately, a lack of trust across the team.

Inclusive leadership behaviours

Q. In the UAE's expatriate-heavy workforce, where culture and personal context intersect, how do culturally intelligent leaders respond when people show up very differently and what behaviours keep teams connected rather than fragmented?

Culturally, intelligent leaders don't just interpret behaviour through their own cultural lenses. They operate with a much more strategic awareness of behavioural patterns and they regularly ask themselves questions such as “What cultural value might be driving this behaviour?, What's the purpose of this interaction?, Are we building a relationship?, Making a decision?, Negotiating?, and, How is this behaviour impacting performance?”.

They also don't leave expectations open to interpretation. They ensure expectations are clearly defined with their teams on how they are going to successfully collaborate, and they agree on things such as  how decisions will be made, how feedback will be given and received, and so on.

They ensure that their teams are able to work effectively across different cultures. Working cross-culturally is a skill that is often overlooked. Organisations focus on other power skills such as emotional intelligence, strategic thinking and crucial conversations. However, these days most of us are working cross-culturally on a daily basis, so why isn't this being included in our employee development programmes? Assumptions are made that employees will be successful because they are technically competent at their role, forgetting that when we work cross-culturally, we could be as opposite as East meets West (literally). As a leader, if you want to have a successful team, you need to ensure that you provide people with the opportunity to develop these skills.

Employee engagement drivers

Q. In a workforce as mobile and diverse as the UAEs, people constantly decide whether to speak up, stay invested, or quietly disengage. From what you've observed, what makes employees decide that this is an organisation worth committing their energy and trust to — even when the environment feels uncertain?

This is an interesting one, because whether somebody chooses to speak up or remain quiet in a situation is often misinterpreted with labels like ‘they're disengaged’, ‘they're shy’, ‘they're overconfident’, ‘they're rude and overstepping the mark’. These labels are determined by the cultural lens from which we are viewing the situation. If you come from a more collaborative culture, you are more likely to feel free to speak up, but if you come from a more authority-orientated culture, you may perceive speaking up as being disrespectful to the authority or leaders in the room. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that you are shy or disengaged. So, I believe we have to be careful in interpreting these behaviours as showing our employees' commitment and energy to the business. As leaders, we can become more familiar with our cultural behaviours over time to determine whether we are interpreting their response correctly, highlighting where we may need to give additional support or help. During a time of uncertainty, for example, some employees may not have felt the freedom to say they were uncomfortable working from the office and would rather work from home. Just because a team member doesn't say something out loud, it doesn't mean they are not thinking or feeling it.

Sustained behaviour change

Q. Many organisations invest heavily in one-off training programmes, yet struggle to see sustained shifts in behaviour. From your experience, what actually drives permanent behaviour change in leaders and teams, and what are organisations getting wrong when they rely too heavily on episodic training?

Most organisations are investing in standalone learning activities rather than learning interventions that are going to create sustainable performance improvement and behavioural change. To see shifts in behaviour, organisasions need to be looking at learning and development more strategically. They need to consider how they can align it to business priorities, how they can embed it into their workflows and how they can hold employees accountable forwhat they've learnt. If training is a one-off activity carried out in isolation from performance management and then not reinforced by line managers, and not linked to measurable outcomes, how can an organisation expect to see a shift in behaviour? Organisations should be developing learning and development strategies that are aligned to the business objectives, that they can then roadmap and deploy across the employee lifecycle, not just as a single intervention, but as part of a wider capability-building approach.

Evidence-based cultural impact

Q. Cultural intelligence is often treated as a soft skill. What hard data convinces leaders that it directly affects performance, retention, and innovation?

Firstly, cultural intelligence is ethically the right thing to prioritise within an organisation. Every employee should feel culturally respected, understood, and included at work. But beyond ethics, there is also a very strong commercial case for it.

Research from organisations such as Deloitte, SHRM, BlackRock and the Economist Intelligence Unit consistently shows that organisations that effectively leverage cultural diversity and inclusive leadership outperform those that do not. BlackRock-backed research highlighted that companies with the most diverse workforces outperformed the least diverse by an average of 29% annually between 2013 and 2022. Meanwhile, the Economist Intelligence Unit research found that almost 90% of executives believed improved cross-border communication would directly improve profit, revenue, and market share.

Research from SHRM also demonstrates that employees working within positive workplace cultures are significantly less likely to actively seek employment elsewhere, while Deloitte’s work continues to show strong links between culture, human sustainability, inclusion, and long-term organisational performance.

What this tells us is that cultural intelligence is not simply a ‘soft skill’. It is a business capability that influences communication, collaboration, trust, leadership effectiveness, innovation, employee experience, and ultimately organisational performance.

In practice, when employees feel their values, communication styles, and cultural perspectives are understood and respected, they contribute more openly. They collaborate more effectively. They innovate more confidently. And importantly, they are more likely to stay.

What often convinces leaders is when they begin to recognise that many workplace performance challenges are not purely capability issues, they are misalignment issues driven by cultural misunderstanding, differing assumptions, and invisible communication barriers. Cultural Intelligence helps organisations identify and address those gaps before they become costly.

Cultural effectiveness clarity

Q. Where have you seen leaders confuse cultural harmony with cultural effectiveness and what are the implications of that confusion for performance in the UAE context?

Cultural diversity naturally means cultural differences. So, I often see leaders hire more of the same culture into an organisation to create cultural harmony because its perceived ieve as being ‘just easier’. Before you know it, you can potentially end up with one main dominant culture within a team. This may be considered as beneficial in the short term because it avoids conflict, but ultimately it drives a ‘group think’ behaviour where no-one wants to speak-up and deviate from the dominant narrative of the team. This can have a huge impact on employee engagement, innovation, and quality of decision-making.

Leadership accountability for belonging

Q. When belonging is treated as a leadership capability rather than an engagement outcome, what expectations, incentives, or accountabilities actually change for leaders and where do most organisations stop short in the UAE?

When belonging is reframed as a leadership capability, it moves initiatives to infrastructure and becomes embedded in ‘the way that we do things around here’. Leaders who can create clarity among the team, enable contributions from culturally-diverse perspectives, and manage the team cultural dynamics as part of their performance, will see greater success in team effectiveness, employee retention, and employee engagement. Organisations can hold the leader accountable for team performance outcomes, the team's stability, and the quality of their collaboration. Unfortunately, where organisations fall short is they stop at awareness training, engagement surveys, and culturally-appropriate employee comms. However, they are not thinking about redefining their leadership standards and embedding expectations into performance management systems. From a learning and development strategy perspective, belonging is not something you ’create’”, it's something that emerges when the infrastructure enables people to perform at their best.

In the UAE, diversity is not the challenge, the real challenge is execution across diversity. Organisations that are successful are those that treat cultural intelligence as a core leadership capability embedded into how performance is defined and delivered.