Protecting Your Team When the Crisis Is Not a Virus, It Is a War
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Talent Retention, Evacuation Planning, and Duty of Care in Conflict
In COVID, your team feared getting sick. In this crisis, they fear staying.
That single difference is reshaping every aspect of people management in Middle Eastern hospitality right now. The pandemic tested our industry's ability to manage health protocols, remote work, furloughs, and phased reopenings. The current conflict tests something more primal: our ability to keep people in a place they may not feel safe.
During COVID-19, we published two articles on people management and HR strategy that addressed furlough frameworks, communication protocols, and workforce restructuring. The principles of transparent communication, fair treatment, and strategic workforce planning remain foundational. But the operational reality of managing talent during armed conflict introduces pressures that no pandemic playbook anticipated.
Understanding the Expatriate Flight Risk
Gulf hospitality is built on expatriate labor. In most GCC hotel markets, expatriate workers constitute 80 to 95% of the total hospitality workforce, spanning every level from housekeeping to general management. This workforce model, which has powered the region's remarkable hospitality growth for decades, becomes a profound vulnerability during a security crisis.
Unlike a pandemic, which restricted movement outward, a conflict triggers it. Expatriate workers have home countries to return to, families urging them to leave, and embassies issuing advisories that range from caution to mandatory evacuation. The decision to stay is not merely professional; it is personal, emotional, and (for workers with families in the region) agonizing.
Owners and operators who fail to acknowledge this reality will lose their best people first. High-performing managers and specialists have the most options and the least tolerance for uncertainty. If they do not feel that their employer has a plan (a real plan, not reassuring platitudes) they will make their own plan. And that plan will involve a one-way ticket.
The Three-Tier Talent Framework
Tier 1: Evacuate and Release
Some employees will leave regardless of what you offer. Their families have demanded it, their embassies have advised it, or their personal risk tolerance has been exceeded. Attempting to retain these individuals through financial incentives or contractual obligations is counterproductive and ethically questionable.
For Tier 1, the priority is a managed, dignified departure. Process end-of-service benefits promptly. Assist with flight arrangements where commercial options are limited. Provide reference letters immediately. Crucially, maintain the relationship. These individuals are not disloyal; they are making a reasonable decision under extraordinary circumstances. When the crisis subsides, many will be willing to return, but only if their departure was handled with respect.
The cost of Tier 1 departures should be budgeted explicitly. End-of-service gratuities, repatriation flights, and administrative processing represent a predictable cash outflow that must be incorporated into the break-even model discussed in Article 1.
Tier 2: Retain with Incentives
The middle tier comprises employees who are uncertain. They are weighing their options, monitoring the situation, and looking to their employer for signals. This is the tier where the active retention strategy has the highest return on investment.
The retention toolkit includes financial and non-financial elements. On the financial side, consider conflict hardship allowances, paid in addition to base salary, that explicitly compensate for the elevated risk and difficulty of remaining in the region. These allowances should be transparent, time-bound (reviewed monthly), and meaningful. A token payment is worse than no payment at all because it signals that the employer does not take the situation seriously.
For employees with families, they offer family evacuation support: fund and facilitate the relocation of dependents to safe locations while the employee remains on duty. This addresses the most acute source of anxiety for mid-career expatriates (the safety of their children) without requiring the employees themselves to leave. The cost is high but far less than the cost of replacing experienced hospitality professionals in a depleted labor market.
Non-financial retention is equally important. Provide weekly briefings from management on the security situation, the company's contingency plans, and the operational outlook. Uncertainty is the enemy of retention. People can tolerate difficult conditions if they feel informed and included in the response. They cannot tolerate the sense that their employer is making plans they are not privy to.
Accommodation security is another powerful retention tool. If your hotel has unused rooms (and at current occupancy levels, it certainly does), offer on-site housing to key staff. Living inside a well-secured hotel building is objectively safer than commuting through a city experiencing periodic security incidents. It also eliminates transportation challenges and demonstrates tangibly that the employer is investing in staff wellbeing.
Tier 3: Local Workforce Acceleration
The third tier addresses a structural shift that this crisis is accelerating: the transition toward greater reliance on local nationals in Gulf hospitality workforces.
GCC governments have pursued nationalization programs in hospitality for years, with mixed results. The current crisis, by depleting the expatriate labor pool, is accomplishing what policy incentives alone could not. Hotels that invest now in recruiting, training, and promoting local nationals will emerge from this crisis with a more resilient workforce model, one that is less vulnerable to the expatriate flight risk that is currently causing such disruption.
This is not a simple substitution. Local workforces in most Gulf states have different expectations regarding working hours, compensation structures, and career progression than the expatriate workers they would replace. Operators need to adapt their HR models, not simply slot local hires into expatriate-designed positions. But the owners who fund and demand this adaptation now will hold a competitive advantage when the next regional disruption occurs.
Duty of Care: Who Is Responsible for What?
One of the most contentious questions emerging from the current crisis is the allocation of duty-of-care obligations between owners and operators. The management agreement typically assigns operational responsibility, including HR management, to the operator. But the duty of care for employees working in a conflict zone raises questions that most HMAs do not clearly address.
Who pays for evacuations? If the operator decides to evacuate expatriate staff, is the cost borne by the hotel's operating budget (and therefore ultimately by the owner) or by the operator's corporate resources? What about employees who are injured or traumatized by conflict-related incidents? If an employee remains at the owner's request and is harmed, what is the liability framework?
These questions do not have universal answers, but they must be addressed explicitly and in writing before a crisis forces improvised responses. We advise every owner to engage their legal counsel and their operator in a formal discussion of duty-of-care allocation during the current conflict. Document the agreed framework. Ensure that insurance coverage (both the hotel's property and liability policies and the operator's corporate policies) covers the scenarios you are discussing. Many do not.
These are not questions that a generalist HR consultant or even an experienced hotelier will instinctively know how to navigate. They sit at the intersection of employment law, management agreement interpretation, insurance coverage, and operational reality. This convergence demands specialist oversight from someone whose role is to protect the owner's position across all four dimensions simultaneously.
Mental Health: The Invisible Casualty
Staff working in hotels near conflict zones are experiencing sustained psychological stress. Even in markets that are not directly targeted, the ambient anxiety of regional instability (compounded by social media exposure, family separation, and the economic uncertainty of potential job loss) takes a cumulative toll. The effects manifest as reduced concentration, increased interpersonal conflict, absenteeism, and a deterioration in service quality that guests notice even if managers do not name its cause.
Providing access to professional mental health support is not a luxury benefit during a crisis. It is an operational necessity. Partner with employee assistance programs that offer multilingual counseling. Create peer support structures within your team. Train managers to recognize signs of acute stress. And, perhaps most importantly, create a culture where acknowledging the difficulty of the situation is permitted rather than penalized.
The hospitality industry asks its people to project warmth, competence, and calm regardless of what they are experiencing personally. During a conflict, that ask becomes extraordinarily heavy.
Adnan Shamim
Managing Partner, Middle East & Africa
Alex Sogno
Founder & CEO
QUESTIONS FOR YOUR NEXT OWNERS' MEETING
1. Have you categorized your workforce into the three tiers? What percentage falls into each?
2. What is the total budgeted cost of Tier 1 departures (end-of-service, repatriation, administrative processing)?
3. Are you offering hardship allowances or family evacuation support to Tier 2 staff? Are they meaningful enough to actually influence retention decisions?
4. Is there a documented duty-of-care allocation between owner and operator for the current conflict?
5. What mental health resources are available to your retained staff? Are managers trained to recognize acute stress?
The first four articles of this series have addressed immediate triage. In Phase 2, we turn from survival to strategy: whether and how to invest capital, execute renovations, and reposition your brand for whatever comes after this conflict.
