Culture & Alignment · 6 min read
Are people your biggest asset, or a number on the balance sheet?
If they really are the asset, then treat belief the way you treat any other asset.
Nothing moves until someone believes it first. We exist to close the gap between what people believe and what they do. That is the whole of our point of view, and it starts inside the organisation, long before a customer ever hears a word.
The disconnect in this region is not anecdotal. Only 27% of UAE employees are engaged at work. Saudi Arabia sits at 26%. (Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, UAE & Saudi Arabia Country-Level Data, 2025.) Put plainly, roughly three in every four people turn up, do the job and keep their belief to themselves. They have heard the strategy. They have not bought into it.
Every annual report in the region says the same thing: our people are our greatest asset. If that were true, engagement would be treated with the seriousness of any other asset on the books. It rarely is. Engagement sits with HR, measured once a year, presented as a percentage and then filed. Strategy sits with leadership. The two seldom meet in the same room.
The cost of that separation is now measurable at a global scale. Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the world economy around $10 trillion in lost productivity in 2025, roughly 9% of global GDP. Replacing someone who leaves costs about 40% of salary for a frontline role, 80% for a technical professional and up to 200% for a leader or manager. Disengagement is not a soft metric. It is one of the largest unmanaged costs on any balance sheet.
Our own industry offers the clearest test of the slogan. From WPP to Publicis to Interpublic, the holding companies that sell creativity, which is to say they sell people, have spent two years making redundancies in the name of efficiencies. WPP has cut almost 11,000 roles since the start of 2025, with up to a thousand more expected by the end of 2026. Omnicom announced about 4,000 further layoffs on completing its acquisition of Interpublic, on top of thousands already cut on both sides while the deal closed. Each announcement was framed for investors as cost synergy. None of them was framed for the people who stayed.
This is not an argument against restructuring. Businesses change shape, and sometimes they have to. It is an argument about honesty. If people are a cost line to be optimised, say so, and stop printing the asset slogan on the careers page. If they really are the asset, then treat belief the way you treat any other asset: measure it properly, invest in it before you need it, and notice when it starts to depreciate.
The organisations we see closing the gap do three things. They listen below the management layer, where most of the work and most of the scepticism live. They explain strategy in the language people already use, not the language of the board deck. And they show, visibly and repeatedly, that the work people do is connected to the direction the company says it is taking. None of it is expensive. All of it requires leadership to believe its own words first.
So, are people really the biggest asset, or is it lip service? The answer is not in the annual report. It is in the 27%, and in what leadership decides to do about the other 73.
Topics: Employee Engagement, Culture, Leadership