The four-day region

Saturday is the only day the whole region is off at the same time.

Count the others. The UAE works Monday to Friday. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait work Sunday to Thursday. On Sunday half the company is at a desk and half is at home. On Friday the halves swap. Which leaves Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as the only days when everybody who has to agree on something is inside the same working week.

Four days. Every regional company I have worked inside runs on four and plans on five.

The five-day week is in the weekly report, the Monday kick-off, the Thursday deadline, the leave calendar and the software. Nobody chose it. It arrived with the templates, from whichever office wrote the process first, and it has never been checked against the region it governs.

The cost does not show up as a cost. It shows up as waiting. A brief that leaves Dubai on a Friday afternoon lands in Cairo and Riyadh in the middle of a weekend. A deck due in Dubai on Friday needs a signature from a person whose weekend began on Thursday evening. An approval that takes an hour when two people are in the same country takes three days when they are not, and it was the calendar that took the three days, not the work.

Nobody measures this. There is no line in any report called days lost to the working week, and no meeting where somebody says the quarter had eleven fewer usable days than the plan assumed.

The teams that get this right are the ones that gave up on the fifth day. Plan the region on four and the fifth is a gift, a quiet morning for the work that needs nobody else. Plan on five and every week contains a day when half the company is waiting for the other half.