Service Excellence Raising the Standard Star by Star

The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation serves employers and workers through a network of more than 150 service centres across the UAE. Every one of them is measured by the UAE Government's Global Star Rating System, which rates service centres from two to seven stars on customer experience, service efficiency, innovation, and the way the whole operation is run.

As project manager, working with EY, I led the Ministry's three-year strategy, from 2017 to 2019, to qualify its centres under the system. The plan set two kinds of targets. The first was ambition at the top: at least five centres rated five stars. The second, and harder, was a rising floor for the entire network: no centre below three stars in 2017, below four stars in 2018, or below five stars in 2019.

That floor is what made the strategy work. It moved the conversation from showcasing a few flagship centres to raising every centre in every emirate, and it gave each centre a clear and measurable standard to reach. We exceeded the five-star target, while the minimum rating across the network climbed with each assessment cycle.

The same discipline carried into the Mohammed bin Rashid Government Excellence Award. I helped prepare the file that presented the Ministry's achievements for the award's fifth cycle. At the ceremony in January 2019, MOHRE won five awards, including Best Government Entity in Smart Services and the shield for the entity with the most first places in international reports, and the Ministry's Undersecretary received the Prime Minister's Medal for Best Undersecretary.