RIYADH, 5 October 2003 — During a visit to a polytechnic run by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees in Amman in 1989 I noticed that there were hardly any students on the campus that day. The trip to Amman and Damascus on behalf of Arab News had been sponsored by UNRWA as part of its effort to highlight the UN Agency’s role in rehabilitating the Palestinian refugees.
When we entered one of the polytechnic’s laboratories, the Palestinian students hardly noticed our presence, though there were four or five of us. They were fully absorbed in their lab experiments.
“We Palestinians have no future if we do not get a good education,” one of the students told Arab News. That remark has remains etched in my memory as I survey the social landscape in the Kingdom. Here time seems to stand still at least for a section of the Saudi youth.
Khaled A. Al-Jeraisy, president of Riyadh House Est. and author of “Time Management from Islamic and Administrative Perspectives”, believes that the Saudi society is at the forefront of developing countries in caring for and utilizing time. Being a conservative Islamic society, he adds, it has always been urged by our religion to save time and warned against its misuse.
He quotes a Hadith (traditions of the Prophet) in this context; “On the Day of Resurrection, man will be is asked about four matters: How he spent his lifetime; how he spent his youth; from where he acquired his wealth and how he spent it; and what he did with his knowledge. In this saying there are two questions about time, the first is generally about his lifetime and the second is about his youth being the most fertile age stage with respect to work and productivity.”
The significance of the Hadith is indisputable but to what extent is the Hadith being followed as a source of guidance by the Saudis? The older generation has maintained the tradition of hard work and self-discipline. They know the value of time, as they have been through hard times during the pre-oil boom era. The economic boom that followed the discovery of oil changed all that.
Today, with plenty of time and resources at their disposal, young Saudis hang around in cafes and boulevards watching satellite TV, making phone calls or just chatting. Statistics compiled by Booz-Allen-Hamilton show the average household averages five hours per day watching TV compared with three and a half in western Europe. Internet usage in the Kingdom stands at 1.33 hours and 25 minutes in Western Europe. Mobile phone use is seven minutes per day in the Kingdom versus three minutes in Western Europe, and land phones 15.4 minutes daily in the Kingdom as against nine minutes in the EU countries.
Concerning productivity Al-Jeraisy said that his book examines the subject from three viewpoints. First, it stresses the importance that Islam accords to time and reviews all the texts urging use of time “and viewing time as a trust with Muslims to be judged by God on Doomsday.”
The second is the link between time management and other administrative domains. “Within that framework, I have discussed the relation between time, planning, orientation, control and decision making in the light of the different administration studies and theories of time management and time investment.”
In his book, “Time for Success,” Alec Mackenzie identifies 20 areas of concerns worldwide in terms of time management for the professional community.
Selecting from his long list of time wasting activities, Jeraisy says that the immediate priorities that call for an organized response from the Kingdom’s public and private sectors are: telephone calls; drop-in visitors; procrastination; incomplete or delayed information; confused responsibility or authority; untrained or inadequate staff.
According to Wang Wei-Cieh, Economic and Cultural Representative of Taipei, those who want to do business with Saudi Arabia end up losing four days both ways in terms of weekends lost, since there are no transactions on Thursday and Friday in the Kingdom and Saturday and Sunday elsewhere in the world. Unless the time factor is synchronized, businessmen on both sides have to factor in the four-day period each week when they cannot transact any business.
The situation is compounded by the fact that government employees in Saudi Arabia enjoy at least four months of vacation annually. Weekends account for 96 days a year; add another 12 days each for Eid Al-Fitr and Eid Al-Adha holidays, and you get 120 days or four months. This excludes the lean season of July and August, when Saudis will be away on vacation with their families, leaving in effect only six months.
By contrast, the number of holidays in the EU countries ranges from seven to 14, with the Dutch taking only one week off a year. Britain (eight holidays), Greece (12), Austria and Portugal (13 each) and Finland 14 holidays are next.
However, Khaled Al-Jeraisy challenges the argument that productivity level in the Kingdom is low. “This statement,” he points out, “is not wholly correct, unless we compare the Saudi employee with his counterparts in highly industrialized countries. But if compared to his counterparts in developing countries, the Saudi employee’s use of time is very exceptional.”
He argues that Al Qeith’s study showed that 80 percent of Saudi managers use time effectively. And that they regard it as an important source for investment.”
Time management is a serious business in the West. In Germany, for example, the bus schedule handed out at Frankfurt International Airport shows the arrival and departure timings of buses leaving the airport at odd times such as 9.11 a.m. or 10.23 p.m. Invariably, the bus arrives and departs on the dot.
Mohammed Al-Homaidi, Saudi journalist, said: “The problem that I face is that government officials, general managers and military officers sometimes forget appointments given to me. People do not give a clear-cut appointment. They only say: ‘I’ll give you a call, which they don’t.”
“I think working in the government sector makes people lazy. However, with government jobs shrinking, the new generation of Saudis is beginning to realize the importance of time and its relation to productivity. This is especially true of Saudis working in the private sector and those who have their own business.”
In essence the root cause of the problem could be traced to the mindset of at least a section of the Saudi youth who have imbibed warped values from their elders. They have failed to define time as an asset, as a non-renewable resource in which one should invest one’s effort wisely.
Terrorist outfits like Al-Qaeda have been found to target schoolchildren with nothing much to keep them usefully occupied.
The situation, however, is beginning to change. “Now it is considered impolite if a person shows up late for an appointment. Young Saudis working in major organizations like the BAE Systems have got the message across. They have a good track record in terms of punctuality,” said Walid Abu Khaled, head of Public Relations and Communications of BAE Systems for the Middle East. While that may be true for Saudis working in multinational companies, the situation in other organizations leaves much to be desired.
