If you see something you’re not happy with, what do you do? Do you complain, or do you do something about it? It’s all too easy to take the first option. It’s an entirely different story, however, to be the person who actually takes action.
Tareq Al Awadhi is one of those individuals. Naturally empathetic, he wants to help people in need and is always on the lookout for ways to reduce his environmental footprint. “I believe that in order to survive,” he says, “you need to support each other. Life is full of surprises and not always pleasant ones. Sometimes it can be difficult, horrible even, so we have to help each other when we can.”
Being able to follow this manifesto at work as well as at home is essential for Tareq, a Regional Account Manager for Oil & Gas at Siemens Kuwait. “When I’m working for a corporation,” he says, “I feel the corporation itself needs to contribute. We take for granted the waste and the pollution that companies can produce, so there’s really an obligation for them to help out.”
Big ideas begin with a small step
It’s a profound statement, but does it really happen? And can just one individual within a company of 377,000 people exert their power to ensure these crowd-pleasing words become a concrete reality? But Tareq was determined and realized that, if he could harness the might of Siemens and the people within it, he could make a difference.
He started small six years ago, when he made a pact with a colleague to donate blood every 80 days. “Everyone has a work buddy who is closer to you than your own brother or sister,” he says. “Donating blood is a nice activity because we get to hang out and we know the benefits of what we’re doing.”
But it didn’t stop there. Managers knew he was dedicated to helping others, and so he was asked to work with a team to spark ideas about how Siemens could contribute to Kuwaiti society as part of the company’s corporate society responsibility (CSR) initiatives.
Sustenance for street cleaners
Tareq was keen to be on-board and, after much deliberation, the group came up with the idea of donating food packages to Kuwait’s street cleaners, nicknamed ‘yellow overalls’ due to their brightly colored clothing. “It can be extremely hot here,” says Tareq. “So we had the idea that we could help the street cleaners.”
Tareq wasted no time, setting up a collection point where staff could donate as many Kuwaiti dinar as they would like, with the total to be matched by Siemens. The donations were then used to create food packages, which Tareq and a colleague were able to source cheaply from wholesalers. “I told them ‘We have this activity, this is my budget, let’s create food packages.’ We handled the payment and invoicing, and then loaded the food into our cars.” The pair then rallied 30 colleagues to help deliver 90 much-needed parcels. The project was so successful they ran it again the following year, upping the food packages to 125.
Replanting the desert
Knowing he could do more to help his community, Tareq returned to the drawing board to think about how else the company could give back. He discovered a scheme set up by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, a research organization that works with schools to plant 1,000 indigenous trees every year in the desert. The scheme not only teaches the country’s next generation about the environment, but also opens up opportunities for farming. “When you go into the desert and you see how barren it is, you realize you actually have to do something about it,” he says.
Tareq wanted to get involved so organized for the Siemens Kuwait CEO plus 25 volunteers to journey to the desert to plant seedlings. “This is the wonderful thing about CSR activity. When people volunteer and give up their time, there’s some form of sacrifice. But when you see they’re happy to do it, it always brings me joy,” he says.
But he wants to go even further, and is now thinking about how to use scrap materials to create an irrigation system to ensure rain can be collected to water the trees. “Scrap here is a hot topic because people can misuse it, but there are lots of pipes and barrels that we could actually utilize. Whatever waste we generate from business at Siemens, let’s reuse it to make something useful,” he says.
Not only that, Tareq says his initiatives have made him more sociable at work: “I actually met five colleagues within the office that I rarely engaged with on a daily basis, and now we are friends. We talk more and more, so definitely it has added value for me personally.”
Making a difference and taking action
No matter how hard we try, each and every one of us creates some kind of environmental and human impact, and so the question is: how can we counter that impact? “I understand that me sitting in an office doing business, or even by simply living, I am consuming, I am polluting. I am doing something that is, in the end, somehow damaging this planet,” Tareq says. It can be too easy to admit defeat, but Tareq believes we should use this awareness as a drive to do something about it.
“What can I do to make it better? How can I recycle? How can I replace the trees that have been cut down for paper? How can I save the energy that I am consuming? These should always be the thoughts that are running in the back of your head,” he says.
Just because you are only one individual, never assume that your contribution to changing the future will be too small. “Everybody needs to chip in, it doesn’t matter how big their contribution is,” he says. “You don’t have to save 100 people or plant 100 trees to have an impact. Try your best. If it means a single tree, if it means a single life, if it means a single unit, it makes a difference.”
Born in Kuwait, Tareq moved to the UK to complete a Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Manchester. He joined Siemens as a trainee in Building Technologies in Switzerland before moving home to Kuwait. He studied for a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) at the Kuwait Maastricht Business School over the course of three years while working at Siemens and graduated in 2013. His thesis was on the effect of culture on whistle-blowing. He’s now been with the company for 10 years and is a Regional Account Manager for Oil & Gas. Find out more about working at Siemens.
