12 minute read
Future
Rehan Khan Principal consultant for BT and author COMMENT
Always agitated
Stressed out executives and managers appear agitated at the best of times. It’s always telling when employees look to the mood of their boss to determine when they should raise a particularly prickly problem, such as lowerthan-expected sales figures, a project cost overrun, or the loss of a talented employee to competition.
Leaders at the same time have this unnerving feeling that they are not really leading. After all management is not just about sending emails; it’s also about undertaking a deep reflection on strategy, managing people by energising and developing them, building the team and organisational culture, as well as a host of other elements. Yet too many time-pressed executives appear stuck in first gear, doing one aspect of management only, which is communication – and mostly electronic.
I often hear stories from executives who say their most productive periods at work are either very early in the morning or very late at night. Their day? It’s wiped out by constant interruptions and distractions.
We know from research that the average number of email messages sent and received per day has been inclining steadily: in 2005 it was 50 emails per day, in 2006 it rose to 69, by 2011 it had jumped to 92, and a recent study showed that in 2019, the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day. Over an eight-hour working day, that equates to about one message every four minutes.
In a 2018 report from RescueTime, which they undertook using anonymous data from 50,000 active users of their software, they found that 50 per cent of users kept checking communication applications like email and Slack every six minutes or less. Worryingly, the average was once every minute, and more than 30 per cent were checking their inbox every three minutes or less.
In parallel they assessed that the longest duration when workers did not check emails or instant messaging – for 50 per cent of the users – was no more than 40 minutes, with the most common period at 20 minutes. They found that more than 66 per cent of users did not go for longer than one hour without some level of interruption from electronic communications.
When managers resort to this way of working, it leaves the mind agitated and in a state of constant communications dialogue. This absurd way of working shifts the brain of leaders from doing work (such as working on a strategy paper, a financial model or a performance review) to processing work or talking about it.
With communication exponentially rising, managers end up discussing work, rather than focusing on doing work, which is why some leaders have resorted to burning the midnight oil at both ends, just so that they feel productive.
Unfortunately, if your organisational culture is one where the agitated state of mind is the norm, then neglecting your inbox will result in colleagues and customers chasing you even more, as well as sending instant messages, and bombarding you with why you haven’t answered their email within five minutes of them sending it.
To move away from this bizarre way of working requires a change in culture, which can only begin from the top of the organisation. But mainly it comes from a realisation among leaders that the way we currently manage is detrimental to the health of our employees, the efficiency of our organisations and the bottom line, as we leak value from the time of talented and well-paid employees.
Full inbox
The average number of email messages sent and received per day has been increasing steadily
126
92
50
INTERVIEW
Rami Tabbara Co-founder of digital real estate investment platform Stake
How has the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the regional real estate industry? We believe that Covid massively helped the local and regional real estate industry. By being one of the first cities to open up and allowing tourists to come, Dubai became an even bigger destination hotspot than preCovid. This helped attract a record number of transactions in both the secondary and off-plan market in the first four months of 2021. Prices of luxury properties have seen a major uptick and people are realising how much value for money you get from investing in Dubai property. You also had a lot of residents who were renting realise that there isn’t a safer and better city in the world to live in, so they decided to become home owners. With the initial shock of Covid pushing market prices to touch a bottom in Q2/Q3 2020, many end users decided to capitalise on the opportunity and buy a home in an upgraded villa or apartment. Moreover, when Covid struck, a lot of the big developers halted new projects which delayed more upcoming supply. This was something that was heavily needed and definitely helped in rebalancing the demand and supply equilibrium.
I also believe regionally, the GCC countries did a great job in handling the pandemic when compared to other major countries globally. That gave their domestic real estate markets a big boost from both local and international investors.
What are the key benefits of investing via a crowdfunding platform? There are many benefits to using a crowdinvesting platform to invest in property. The main ones are the following: Portfolio diversification: instead of locking up your capital into one property you are able to diversify across different apartments in different areas. Diversity is the key to lowering risk. By splitting your portfolio across different units, you mitigate for vacancy risk (the time the apartment is empty); accessibility: you are able to invest in an asset class that usually has high barriers to entry from a cash perspective. Crowdinvesting enables you to invest in properties that you have not been able to have access before due to smaller investment size; passive investment/ hassle free: you are able to buy property without having to go through the paperwork and admin involved with registering the unit at the DLD. You are also able to earn monthly income from rent without the hassle of dealing with any brokers, finding a tenant, signing leases, handling maintenance and property management. The investment is carried out digitally from end to end, from acquisition to
exit; transparency and control: compared to investing via a REIT, crowdinvesting gives you greater control over the portfolio selection process and a closer look into the details of every property.
How can crowdfunding help regional developers? Massively. Having worked with developers for the last 15 years, I see crowdfunding as a necessary channel that they need to be involved in. In our region, real estate is one of the most sought-after asset classes. People have an affinity for property from a young age. That being said, the entry points for many are high. With crowdinvesting, developers are able to offer their properties to a much bigger audience than they were able to without. I also believe that it allows developers to ensure their investors are not overcommitting their capital into one product, which reduces their default rates. Through crowdinvesting, developers can enable investors to experience and invest in a much larger and diverse inventory selection.
Which type of properties gain the most traction? We are seeing that investors prefer to invest in locations that offer a stable rental yield with capital appreciation and preservation. These locations are mostly ones that are in prime locations. Having said that, we are also seeing that investors are open to looking at B locations if the price is below market and has a strong rental yield.
Is crowdfunding the future of property investment in the region? Without a doubt. We believe that the world has massively changed after Covid. Technology is going to be the driving force in everything we do. Investors will not have the patience for long and tedious processes when they invest, and they will also prefer doing it digitally. Moreover, investors are a lot more cautious in where and how much they invest. We are seeing a big demand towards transparency and lower risk. Crowdinvesting ticks all of these boxes by enabling people to participate in real estate investment on their phone, from the comfort of their homes, and with smaller amounts.
Big green push
Global ESG assets are growing steadily and could reach more than a third of the projected $140.5 trillion total by 2025
2016 $22.8trn
2018 $30.6trn
2021 $37.8trn 2025 $53trn
SOURCE: BLOOMBERG INTELLIGENCE
Vipul Kapur Head of Private Banking, Mashreq Bank COMMENT
Growth cannot come at a green cost
+$2trn
In economic value can be unlocked in the GCC with sustainable initiatives by 2030
1m
Jobs can be created along with it O ver the last decade, governments and businesses worldwide have started a shift towards more sustainable investing and have enacted multiple measures to promote the environmental, social, and governance ecosystem. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this shift as it laid bare social and environmental shortcomings in the global economy, how businesses operate and how they speak to their customers. Now, with businesses incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics into their operations, the question must be asked: is it still acceptable to aim for ever greater economic growth at all costs?
GENERATING ‘POSITIVE’ PROFITS The good news is that ESG principles provide businesses with growth opportunities – and they provide a roadmap to sustainability. Indeed, they open the door to sustained growth if implemented altruistically. To leverage the broad benefits that ESG policies present to businesses, governments and companies in the GCC should incorporate sustainability into the overall economic agenda; it must become a defining part of the GDP fabric – a central guiding force for good. This means looking at what multiple stakeholders are seeking in their daily lives: what do citizens need in a world increasingly concerned by climate change, sustainable use of materials and the treatment of human beings?
Research shows that if governments can learn what is needed to deliver good ESG outcomes, and when they holistically adopt and implement sustainable initiatives, the GCC can unlock more than $2 trillion in economic value and create more than one million jobs by 2030.
The private sector – particularly the investment community – has already spearheaded sustainable investments and the outcomes are proven. A trends report released by the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment 2020 highlighted that between 2018 and 2020, total US domiciled sustainably invested assets under management, both institutional and retail, grew by 42 per cent to $17.1 trillion.
This represents almost 33 per cent of the $51.4 trillion in total US assets now under professional management, according to reports. Further, as per Bloomberg Intelligence, global ESG assets are on track to exceed $53 trillion by 2025, representing more than a third of the $140.5 trillion in projected total assets under management. The accelerated growth in sustainable investing can partially be attributed to millennials who are choosing to actively precipitate change that can have a positive impact on generations to come.
A FIELD OF OPPORTUNITIES If we consider that a great wealth transfer is already underway with wealth passing from baby boomers to the next generation, millennials are also in a unique position to engender positive long-term change through the investment and living choices that they make. That is why the sustainable investment of public funds is now becoming a global norm, presenting GCC countries with a unique opportunity to take the lead and become change-makers.
Leading the charge enables GCC countries to reap the rewards of economic growth, industrial development, and innovation. In the past, sustainability has largely been the bastion of activists and select global agencies – but it is now within the reach of policymakers. There are three important pillars for state players in the GCC to consider when striving to achieve sustainable growth.
THE THREE PILLARS OF SUSTAINABLE INVESTING Sustainable investing is a way to invest and seek returns while staying true to your values: this is as relevant to sovereign funds as it is to national infrastructure or economic investment strategies and private sector investment. For all stripes of investors, only companies that are aligned with ESG values should be invested in. For policymakers, this means understanding (and responding to) the reality that citizens no longer feel good about seeing their governments place future growth in unethical companies.
Citizens are conscious of their social, environmental, and governance impact. Governments and private investors must never lose sight of this increasingly important social dynamic.
• The first is exclusion – stop investing in regions, countries, and companies that are not aligned with your values.
• The second is integration – invest in regions, countries, and companies that reflect your values in terms of ESG concerns. • The third is impact – choose to invest in companies that are making a measurable impact. Commonly, ESG filters are applied to exclude or integrate companies. The first step is to select companies that have robust financial metrics and can generate longterm growth. The second step is to further filter these companies based on ESG criteria. These include: • Environment: Recognising the need to address the challenges related to environmental impact, several companies are adopting measures or creating solutions to reduce emissions and protect the environment. • Social: The policies followed by companies in terms of diversity and inclusion and employee and vendor engagement can have an impact on society. Thus, a company’s social code and culture become highly relevant.
• Corporate governance: Enduring companies follow good corporate governance practices that are well-aligned with shareholder objectives and can create value for all stakeholders. By adopting sustainable investing, high net worth individuals (HNWIs) can generate long-term positive returns while proactively taking steps to limit the impact of unsustainable practices on society and the environment. For example, those concerned about the water crisis can easily find ways to invest in companies that are working towards creating irrigation or desalination solutions. On the other hand, if you are passionate about addressing the climate crisis, then you can channel your money into companies that are focused on alternative energy or those that have set clear objectives in terms of reducing their carbon footprint.
The transition to sustainability is happening at a rapid pace and the GCC cannot afford to be passive about sustainable investing.
