Let us start with honesty.
You checked the news this morning before you opened your laptop. You have a colleague whose family is in Tehran, another whose parents are in Tel Aviv, and a third who has been quietly asking whether their visa will still be valid if the situation escalates. You held a team meeting this week and someone asked a question you did not fully know how to answer. And then, because business does not stop, you went back to your desk and kept going.
This is not a think-piece written from a comfortable distance. This is for those of us who are navigating this from inside the Gulf, leading teams, making payroll decisions, handling relocations, and trying to be decent human beings while also keeping organizations alive.
The Middle East in 2025 and into 2026 is not a risk scenario in a textbook. It is Tuesday morning. It is your inbox. It is the conversation you are having — or avoiding — with your people right now.
What Our People Are Actually Feeling
Before strategy, before policy, before continuity planning, acknowledge this.
Your workforce is not a homogenous block of professionals who compartmentalise geopolitical anxiety between 9 and 6. Your teams are made up of people with families in conflict-adjacent countries, expatriates who cannot get a flight home if things escalate quickly, migrant workers who have no financial safety net if operations pause, and local nationals who are watching something unfold in their region that their parents’ generation never saw quite like this.
Three-quarters of employees report that geopolitical turbulence directly affects their mood, concentration, and sense of safety at work. In the GCC, that number feels closer to all of us. Because we are not reading about this from elsewhere, we are waking up here, driving to offices here, and wondering quietly whether the contingency plans we were told exist actually do.
The first thing HR leadership must do is not be operational. It is relational. Say something. Do not wait for a formal communication cascade or a legal sign-off on your messaging. Your people need to hear from you—not from the company, from you — that you see what they are navigating and that you are paying attention.
The Salary Question Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Let us address what many organisations are quietly grappling with but not saying publicly: salary pressure in a crisis environment is real, and pretending otherwise is doing your people a disservice.
When regional tensions spike, business pipelines slow. Clients defer decisions. Contracts get put on hold. Procurement freezes. Revenue that was forecast does not arrive on schedule. And organisations — particularly the mid-sized and founder-led businesses that form the backbone of the GCC’s private sector — find themselves making very difficult decisions about compensation.
If you are considering or have implemented salary cuts, here is what ethical people leadership looks like in that moment:
Communicate before you act, not after. A salary cut announced without context, without humanity, and without a clear rationale is not just a financial blow — it is a trust fracture that employees remember for the lifetime of their employment with you. Call people in. Explain what you are seeing. Tell them what alternatives you considered. Show your working.
Protect your most vulnerable earners first. A 10% salary reduction hits a junior operations coordinator fundamentally differently than it hits a senior manager. If cuts are unavoidable, apply them progressively — protect the lowest salary bands entirely where possible, and absorb a disproportionate share at leadership level. This is not just the ethical thing to do; it is the signal that tells your people who you are when it counts.
Put a sunset clause on any reduction. No salary cut should be open-ended. Define the trigger conditions under which salaries will be restored — a revenue milestone, a business review date, a security situation improvement — and commit to it in writing. Uncertainty about financial recovery is corrosive in ways that the original cut often is not.
Consider what you can give back while cash is constrained. If salaries must be cut, look at what non-cash support you can accelerate: flexible working arrangements, additional leave, health cover extensions, family support resources. Money is not the only currency of care.
OLOE Benefits — A Tool Most GCC Organisations Are Under-Using
Out of Location and Operational Expenses benefits — the financial provisions that support employees who are displaced, working remotely from outside their normal location, or operating in elevated-risk environments — are one of the most underutilised instruments in GCC HR toolkits right now.
In a region where the security picture has meaningfully shifted, OLOE provisions matter for several distinct groups of your workforce:
Employees who have relocated families out of the region and are now effectively maintaining two households — one here, one in a home country or third location — face financial strain that standard compensation packages were not designed to absorb. Where your budget allows, OLOE top-ups that partially offset dual-housing costs send an unmistakable message: we see what this is costing you beyond your job description.
Employees working from temporary or alternative locations due to facility disruptions, evacuation protocols, or security advisories need clarity on what is covered: accommodation differentials, transportation changes, connectivity costs, temporary schooling for children. The absence of a clear OLOE framework forces people to absorb these costs privately or spend their energy chasing reimbursements at the worst possible time.
Employees in roles that require continued physical presence in elevated-risk environments — logistics, operations, field-based functions — deserve a hardship or risk allowance that is explicitly named and communicated. Asking people to show up in difficult circumstances without financial acknowledgement of what that requires is an extraction of value that your culture will not recover from easily.
Review your existing mobility and expense policies now. Ask explicitly: do our OLOE provisions cover what our people are actually experiencing? If the answer is no — or worse, if you are not sure — that is the work to do before the next escalation, not during it.
Mental Health Is Not a Benefit. It Is the Infrastructure.
We mentioned this at the top and we mean it — the mental health angle is not an add-on to crisis HR strategy. It is the foundation.
Here is what we know from working in and alongside organisations in this region through this period: the psychological weight of living and working in proximity to active geopolitical conflict is cumulative and non-linear. People can function at high capacity for weeks and then find themselves unable to concentrate, or experiencing anxiety that feels disproportionate to the immediate trigger. This is not a weakness. It is the predictable neurological outcome of sustained ambient stress.
What actually works — and what organisations here are getting right:
The Employee Assistance Programme your company has been paying for quietly needs to become visible and accessible in the languages your workforce actually speaks. Not English-only. Not buried in a PDF on the intranet. Active, repeated, human communication — from managers, not just HR — about what is available and how to access it.
Middle managers are the most important mental health resource you have and the least prepared for this role. They are the first person an employee will signal to, often indirectly. They are the ones running the meetings where someone goes quiet when the news is bad. Equip them — not with a policy document, but with a two-hour practical session on recognising distress signals, holding a non-judgemental check-in conversation, and knowing when to refer someone to professional support. This investment costs almost nothing and protects everything.
Family inclusion matters more than most organisations acknowledge. In the GCC, many of your expatriate employees have spouses and children here with them. Those families are also experiencing anxiety, disrupted routines, and uncertainty about the future. An EAP that includes family counselling — and that is communicated to the whole household, not just the employee — reduces the psychological load that employees are carrying into work with them every day.
Create legitimate space for honest conversation at team level. This does not mean requiring people to share. It means a manager saying, openly, at the start of a team meeting: “Things feel different right now. I want you to know I notice that, and if any of you want to talk, I am available.” That sentence costs nothing and signals everything.
And for founders and senior leaders specifically: you are not exempt from this. The people running GCC organisations through this period are also navigating their own uncertainty, their own family concerns, their own sleepless nights. Model the behaviour. Use the EAP yourself. Talk about what you are finding hard. Your people are watching how you carry this, and it gives them permission to acknowledge their own experience.
What to Do This Month — With Names and Dates Attached
This is not a list of suggestions. It is a practical checklist for organisations that are serious about leading their people responsibly through what comes next.
Know exactly where your people are and what their situation is. Maintain a live register — not a spreadsheet that was last updated six months ago — of every employee’s nationality, visa type, family location, and physical work location. In a fast-moving situation, this is the document that determines who you call first and what you can offer them.
Calculate your End of Service Gratuity exposure today. If your organisation had to exit the market — for any reason, at any speed — your EOSG liability is the number that does not move. Calculate it. Provision for it. Know it. Discovering this liability mid-crisis, when you also need liquidity for operations, is a catastrophic position to be in.
Appoint one named Crisis HR Lead with real authority. Not a committee. A committee does not make calls at 11pm when something escalates. One person, with a clear mandate, with pre-authorised decision-making power for the first 72 hours of an incident, and with a backup who knows everything they know.
Communicate your mental health and financial support resources this week. Not next quarter. Not after the situation stabilises. Now — because the people who most need to hear it are already wondering whether you have thought about them.
Run a scenario exercise. Gather your leadership team, give them a realistic regional escalation, and walk through your response. Who makes which decisions? What do you communicate to employees in the first hour? What happens to payroll if banking channels are disrupted? What do you do for the employee whose family is in an affected area and who needs to leave on short notice? The gaps you find in that room are infinitely cheaper to address than the ones you discover in the real event.
Review your OLOE policy for current relevance. Check whether it covers displaced employees, dual-location costs, risk environments, and family relocation support. If it does not, update it before you need it.
A Final Word — To Everyone Running Organisations Here
We chose to be here. Many of us built careers here, raised children here, put down roots in a region that has given us opportunities and communities and lives we are genuinely committed to.
That commitment does not require us to pretend that everything is fine when it is complicated. It requires us to be honest with our people, generous with our support, and rigorous about our preparation.
The organisations that will come through this period with their people intact, their cultures coherent, and their reputations for decent leadership preserved are not the ones that communicated perfectly or had the most sophisticated continuity plans. They are the ones whose people felt, throughout, that they were seen and that their leaders were genuinely trying.
That is the work. It is harder than any policy document, and it is more important than any of them.
This blog is written for HR leaders, founders, and people managers operating in the GCC. If you found it useful, share it with a colleague who is navigating the same territory. And if something here resonated or something important was missed, write back — this conversation benefits from many voices inside the region.
VERVE Humane Capital
We are an anti-consulting people firm for the tech industry. We help tech companies attract, retain, and develop high-potential talent – leading to measurable gains in productivity and profitability. We don’t just send CVs. We partner with founders from problem to solution. Connect with us on:
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