Written by RHILLANE Ayoub
TLDR: Our team splits across Morocco, Dubai and California, and every “best practice” DEI framework I had read assumed one labor code, one set of public holidays and one working week. Building a team across three legal systems forced a more honest version of inclusion, one built on named tradeoffs instead of a values statement. The policies that actually held up were the ones written for the friction points, not the ones written to sound good.
The first time it broke was a Friday. Our Morocco office runs Monday to Friday with prayer breaks and Friday as a half day in many companies; our Dubai contractor was mid-workweek by the old Gulf calendar; our California hire was still asleep. I had scheduled a client call that no single market’s normal week actually accommodated, and I realized we had never written down, anywhere, whose working week we defaulted to when the three collided.
That gap sounds small. It was not. It meant every scheduling decision until then had been made by whoever happened to speak up first, which in practice meant the loudest time zone won by default, not the fairest one.
The Problem With Hiring “Globally” on Paper
Most hiring guidance treats “global team” as a single condition to manage, as if the hard part is finding people in different places and the rest sorts itself out. It does not sort itself out. Morocco’s labor code sets different notice periods and holiday entitlements than UAE free zone contracts, and a California-based hire sits under an entirely different set of at-will employment norms than either. A DEI policy written to be legally safe in one jurisdiction can be silent, or actively wrong, in another.
We learned this the expensive way with a contractor agreement drafted using a template built for the US market, which said nothing about the Moroccan public holidays our Tangier-based team actually observes. The contractor found out about a paid holiday she was owed by asking a colleague, not from anything we had written. Nothing malicious happened. The gap was that “our policy” had quietly meant “the policy of whichever country wrote the template,” and nobody had checked whether it matched the country the person actually lived in.
SHRM’s coverage of talent acquisition practices is explicit that inclusive hiring starts with knowing the local employment context of every hire, not applying one head-office standard everywhere. Reading that after the contractor incident was uncomfortable, because it named exactly the shortcut we had taken.
What Real Inclusion Looks Like Across Three Legal Systems
The deeper truth is that “inclusive” cannot mean “identical.” Treating a Morocco-based employee and a California-based employee under the exact same policy is not equal treatment; it is one jurisdiction’s norms exported onto people who live under different ones. Real inclusion meant writing three separate holiday calendars, three separate notice-period clauses, and one shared document that named which policy applied to whom and why, instead of one document that quietly assumed everyone was the same.
- Morocco team: local labor code holidays, Friday prayer accommodation, contracts in French or Arabic on request.
- Dubai-based contractors: UAE free zone norms, Gulf public holidays, contracts reviewed against local free zone requirements rather than adapted from a Moroccan template.
- California hires: US at-will terms, US federal holidays, a benefits structure that does not assume the Moroccan social security system underneath it.
None of the three calendars overlap by more than a four-hour working window most days, which we now name explicitly in every offer letter so nobody discovers it after signing.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report tracks engagement gaps that widen specifically when employees sense their circumstances are being generalized rather than seen, and that finding matched what we saw internally once we started asking people directly what felt overlooked under the old one-size policy.
Finding People Who Are Honest About the Tradeoffs
Hiring across borders also changed who we looked for. A candidate who says a cross-border role sounds easy is usually someone who has not done it yet. The hires who worked out named the friction unprompted in the interview: the person who asked directly whether Moroccan public holidays would be paid for a role reporting to a US-based manager, the contractor who asked what happened to her notice period if the Dubai entity closed. Those questions were not red flags. They were the sign of someone who had actually thought about what the arrangement required.
We now ask every cross-border candidate one direct question in the first interview: what is the hardest logistical thing about working across three countries with this team, in your own estimation. The answers that reference a specific tradeoff, a holiday mismatch, a time-zone cost, a legal ambiguity, are consistently better hires than the answers that say it sounds exciting with no specifics attached.
What I’d Tell a Founder Building Their First Cross-Border Team
Write the three calendars before you write the values statement. A DEI page on a careers site costs nothing to produce and changes nothing for the person whose paid holiday nobody checked. The unglamorous work, mapping each jurisdiction’s actual labor rules and naming them in the contract, is what inclusion looks like once you have people on three continents instead of one, and it is the same discipline that a digital marketing agency working across borders has to apply to its own hiring before it can credibly advise a client on theirs.
Author Bio: RHILLANE Ayoub is the founder and CEO of a digital marketing agency built across Morocco, Dubai and California, managing hiring and client delivery across all three markets since the company’s founding. If your business is trying to build a genuinely cross-border team and wants to see how the calendar problem actually gets solved in practice, the team at Rhillane Marketing Digital has been living inside it for years.
