The story of the Al Fahim Group, today one of the oldest and largest family business conglomerates in the region, began with a problem many of us are familiar with – cars getting stuck in the sand.
In 1960, Abdul Jalil Al Fahim, who two years earlier had opened a small food and textile shop in Al Ain, noticed that the first vehicles being imported into the emirate of Abu Dhabi were frequently being damaged by sand. With fewer roads back then, he shrewdly switched his business to automobile parts and accessories.
Although Mr Al Fahim passed away in 1996, the family empire he left behind continues to flourish, with interests stretching from automobiles to real estate, energy and travel. The group is the distributor for Mercedes-Benz, Jeep and Fiat in Abu Dhabi, and also represents Bosch, Tyre Plus and Michelin among others. Al Fahim’s eight sons and four female family members comprise the group’s supervisory board and the group’s board of management also has members from the third generation.
But it’s not just the family that has stood by the business over the decades, plenty of its employees have too. Last month, Al Fahim Group held a week-long series of awards ceremonies to honour the 147 employees marking five-year anniversaries with the company.
Of those, 27 who had been with the company for more than 20 years took to the stage at Fairmont Bab Al Bahr Hotel to receive a gift from the chairman of the family supervisory board, Abdullah Abdul Jalil Al Fahim: a certificate and gold coin weighing the same number of grams as the career years celebrated.
The employee with the longest tenure is Rajakrishnan Unny, a receivables and inventory manager in the finance department, who joined the logistics department in the 1970s.
“You started with us even before the first concrete building appeared on Abu Dhabi’s corniche,” Abdullah Al Fahim told him. “It’s been 40 years of loyal and dedicated service. Without employees like you, the company wouldn’t still be standing.”
The “long service awards ceremony” has been held annually since the 1980s, says the group’s director, Khaled Al Fahim, 39, a grandson of the founder, who joined the group as a development manager in 2002.
“This ceremony is an important way to ensure staff from our 13 companies feel part of Al Fahim’s extended family,” says Khaled Al Fahim. “The reason people stay with us is because they feel part of a family. It’s about us being involved with the employees and with the community on a personal basis.”
Another loyal employee is Burton D’Souza, 50, from Inida, who started out as an assistant mechanic 30 years ago and now toils as a body shop supervisor. His father worked as Abdul Jalil Al Fahim’s assistant in the 1960s and over the decades, all of Mr D’Souza’s six siblings have worked for the family – and two still do. “In the good old days, my sister and my mother used to go over to the Al Fahim family home, to their Majlis,” he recalls. “Al Fahim is part of my family too, there’s no two ways about it.”
Such loyalty is hard to find in the modern workplace, where employees flit from company to company as they seek better benefits and career progression. So how can UAE companies retain their staff more effectively?
“Employees stay loyal as long as they feel valued and respected,” says Zeta Yarwood, a Dubai-based career coach. “As long as they feel they are making a contribution, growing, being listened to and being recognised, employees will remain loyal. The moment this changes, they will leave.”
A study in 2012 by Boston Consulting Group and HEC Paris Family Business found that family-run businesses stand a greater chance of survival in a volatile economic market because they focus more on resilience than performance. The researchers found executives of family business tend to invest with a 10- or 20-year horizon, concentrating on what they can do now to benefit the next generation.
Khaled Al Fahim says the group is still steadily growing year on year. “Our vision is linked to the country and to Abu Dhabi’s vision,” he says. “We are looking for opportunities in renewable energy and sustainability, as these are the trends.”
He says retention of staff is crucial to the goals of the business, “especially the mechanics, as it takes a lot of time to train them … You need to retain staff because getting qualified people to replace them is extremely difficult.”
Mr D’Souza says he has had plenty of offers over the years of work elsewhere but never felt inclined to leave the Al Fahims. His three sons – age 20, 16 and 14 – find it hard to understand their father’s dedication. “They ask me ‘why didn’t you bounce from company to company? You could have been somebody else.’ I tell them that there were different dynamics in the old days. Our whole mindset used to be more to do with loyalty than money.”
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