Kuwaiti author and executive coach Abdulaziz Al-Roomi’s argument for a bigger role for human resources takes on renewed relevance as employers confront changing skills and growing pressure on managers.
Human resources sits close to some of a company’s most consequential decisions: who it hires, who it promotes and which skills it develops. Kuwaiti author and executive coach Abdulaziz Al-Roomi argues that the function should also help shape the business decisions behind those choices.
That argument, developed in his book HR Hustler, comes into sharper focus against new international workplace research. Gallup’s 2026 findings show a further decline in employee engagement, while the World Economic Forum identifies skills shortages as a leading obstacle to business transformation.
Together, those findings raise a practical question for employers in Kuwait and beyond: how can a company deliver a new strategy if the people expected to carry it out lack the preparation, support or authority to do so?
From managing processes to understanding the business
Al-Roomi approaches that question through a career spanning several industries. His official biography describes more than two decades of experience across areas including banking, oil and gas, retail, technology and logistics. His work combines human resources with executive coaching and leadership development.
His first book, Prevail, focused on personal leadership. HR Hustler brings that interest into the organisation, examining how HR professionals can connect their responsibilities to commercial priorities and business performance.
The distinction matters. Hiring processes, policies and training programmes are visible parts of HR’s workload. The decisions beneath them concern which capabilities a business needs, how responsibility is distributed and whether employees can deliver what management has promised.
On his website, Al-Roomi presents financial understanding, strategic thinking and leadership as central to that broader role. His proposition is that HR professionals need to understand how their organisations operate, rather than treating people management as a separate discipline with its own isolated measures of success.
A regional perspective on leadership
In a May 2025 interview with CP Magazine, Al-Roomi described business understanding and an entrepreneurial mindset as important gaps he wanted the book to address.
“HR must think and act strategically to serve the best interests of the business and its people,” he told the magazine.
He also discussed the competing responsibilities within the profession. An HR leader may be expected to support employees, enforce policies, coach managers and contribute to strategy. Those responsibilities can pull in different directions, making judgement as important as procedural knowledge.
Regional context is another part of his argument. In the interview, he pointed to a shortage of Middle Eastern examples and case studies, and the difficulties that can arise when organisations view management practices as imported ideas detached from their own working environments.
That gives the discussion a specific relevance for Kuwait. The question is how international management research can inform decisions in a local organisation, with its own workforce, values and operating requirements.
Skills gaps become a strategic constraint
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 draws on more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers across 55 economies. It found that 63% of surveyed employers considered skills gaps a major barrier to transformation over the period to 2030.
Employers expected 39% of workers’ existing skills to change or become outdated during that period. The report also estimated that 59 out of every 100 workers would need training by 2030.
These are global employer expectations, not a measurement of Kuwait’s workforce. They nevertheless explain why decisions about people increasingly belong alongside investment and operational planning.
A technology purchase, for example, establishes neither who can use it effectively nor how existing responsibilities will change. Those questions affect the cost, timing and feasibility of an investment.
The report’s findings also resist a purely technical reading of the future workplace. Analytical thinking remains a leading requirement, alongside resilience and leadership. Preparing employees for change therefore involves more than teaching them how to operate a new system.
Managers are part of the equation
The latest Gallup State of the Global Workplace report adds another dimension. Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, while engagement among managers declined from 27% to 22%.
Those figures describe a worldwide trend, rather than conditions at any particular Kuwaiti employer. Their relevance lies in the role managers play between executive decisions and employees’ daily work.
Gallup also separates its global findings from research on American workplaces adopting artificial intelligence. In that US research, 65% of employees in organisations that had implemented AI reported a positive effect on their individual productivity. Yet only 12% strongly agreed that it had transformed how work was done across their organisation.
The difference illustrates why individual access to technology and organisational change are separate outcomes. A worker may complete a task faster while the wider process remains unchanged.
For HR, that places management capability, coordination and job design within the technology discussion. It also makes the condition of managers themselves relevant to the changes they are expected to lead.
Training, hiring and moving people between roles
The World Economic Forum’s workforce strategy analysis shows employers considering several responses at once. Some 85% expected to prioritise upskilling, 70% planned to hire people with emerging skills, and 51% intended to move employees internally from declining roles into growing ones.
Each approach has different implications. Hiring brings recruitment costs and competition for available talent. Training requires time and a clear destination for the skills being developed. Internal moves depend on identifying abilities that can transfer between jobs.
These are choices about how a company allocates resources and delivers its plans. They also determine what change means for the people already working there.
Al-Roomi’s argument places HR within those choices. As employers prepare for the rest of the decade, the practical question is whether workforce planning helps determine a strategy’s feasibility before commitments are made, or begins only after the organisation has decided what it wants to do.
