By Dr. Mansoor Anwar Habib, Head of Happiness & Tolerance, du
Corporate environments across the UAE are undergoing a fundamental change. As the world shifts to embrace unity, champion diversity and empower people from all walks of life, the need to incorporate these values in the workplace is becoming essential.
For the Year of Tolerance, this is even more pertinent. Bestowed to us by the UAE leadership, this calls for all citizens and residents to embrace tolerance as a universal concept and to entrench tolerant virtues of coexistence, unity and humanity across all pillars of society. In the words of HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, “We want the UAE to be a global reference point for a tolerant culture, via its policies, laws, and practices”.
At du, we are enticing employees to embrace social activities as part of the Year of Tolerance. With happiness and tolerance now unified under one umbrella, our organization has a robust mandate to follow in order to highlight the country’s role in becoming a global capital for tolerance.
This Ramadan, Mawaed Al Rahman is the perfect example for how we can enrich the experience of bringing this vision to life for our colleagues in order to positively impact wider society. While we are empowering our employees this month of Ramadan, Mawaed Al Rahman is able to bring the best out of everybody who calls our nation home. This is because initiatives such as this are influential beyond the walls of an organization.
The effects of this are wide reaching, touching the lives of communities all across the UAE. Through Mawaed Al Rahman, we’ve donated over 50,000 boxes of essential food items to those in need throughout the UAE over the last five years. More importantly, we’ve joined hands with community organizations and volunteers from all backgrounds and ethnicities to enrich the lives of those less fortunate. In doing so, we’ve showcased how organisations in the UAE can become beacons for tolerance through initiatives that reflect tolerance values in truly meaningful ways.
They say to make your customer happy, you have to make your employee happy. I believe the same theory applies to encouraging a tolerant society. With the year of tolerance, we are focused on diversity and inclusion. The whole impact of this is to send a strong message to our society that we are committed to the happiness and tolerance agendas of our country.
We have a diverse and an inclusive workforce that takes tolerance and acceptance to the next level. Made up of 65+ nationalities, we’ve established that empowering different genders and different nationalities can leave a resounding impression on a nation.
Peace, humanity, coexistence and respect: These are four influential pillars for creating the tolerant workplaces of tomorrow. And, by leveraging internal platforms and initiatives, the workplaces of tomorrow can promote the values of tolerance even further and make a real difference to the communities they operate in.
