Tell us about yourself and what it is you do
I am Saja Badran, Culture Transformation and Employee Experience Director at Brand Lounge, where my work sits at the intersection of culture, service, and human experience. Brand Lounge is an ecosystem that treats transformation as a design discipline, believing that a brand promise becomes real only when it is carried consistently by the people inside the organization.
Within this space, I focus on how organizations translate ambition into lived reality: how strategy, leadership, and daily behavior shape what employees feel and what customers ultimately receive.
Across my career working with large and fast-moving organizations, I have seen that performance rarely fails because of weak strategy. It fails when experiences are fragmented and disconnected. My role at Brand Lounge is to design coherence across that full chain, from internal culture to external impact. When experience is aligned at every level, trust deepens and a brand becomes genuinely believed rather than formally performed.
What would you consider your greatest career achievement?
My proudest achievement is helping organizations cross the hardest gap in transformation, the distance between intention and behavior.
I have seen leadership teams craft powerful strategies, invest heavily in systems, and still fail to shift outcomes because the human system was not designed to carry the change. In that space, my work focuses on building coherence: what leaders say, what they reward, what people experience internally, and what customers experience externally.
The moment that matters to me is when culture stops being performed and starts being owned. When teams move from compliance to judgment, and from fragmented effort to shared standards, the organization becomes reliable. Reliability is what creates trust at scale.
Why should culture be viewed as a business critical operating system?
Culture is the operating system that runs the organization when nobody is watching.
It shapes how decisions get made, what people do under pressure, how accountability is handled, and whether service is delivered with consistency or improvisation. Leaders sometimes treat culture as a communications layer. That is the misconception that quietly undermines transformation.
Strategy sets direction. Culture determines traction. If the operating system is unclear, the organization spends energy compensating, duplicating work, and navigating ambiguity. When the operating system is designed well, people move with precision and confidence.
How important is service culture in the Middle East?
Service culture in the Middle East is no longer a hospitality conversation. It is a competitiveness conversation.
As the region expands in tourism, aviation, lifestyle, government services, and experience led development, the market is no longer comparing features only. It is comparing feelings. The question is no longer simply whether services are delivered, but whether they are delivered with dignity, continuity, and intent.
Service culture is the mechanism that connects employee experience to customer experience. When internal standards are coherent and leadership is consistent, external experience becomes dependable. That dependability becomes a differentiator.
How has the culture and service landscape changed across the GCC in recent years?
The GCC has shifted from a service training mindset to an experience design mindset.
Organizations are asking better questions now. Not only how do we improve service, but how do we shape the environment that produces great service without forcing it. There is also a stronger recognition that employee experience is not a soft topic. It is the upstream driver of customer trust.
At the same time, digital transformation has accelerated. That speed has created a new challenge: how to scale without becoming emotionally flat. The organizations that stand out are the ones designing for human judgment and presence, not only for efficiency.
How is the rise of the experience economy shaping competitiveness, differentiation, and long term value creation in the region?
The experience economy has changed the source of value.
Efficiency is increasingly available to everyone. Automation is advancing quickly. Experience is what remains difficult to replicate. Experience is built through perception, memory, and relationship, and those live inside culture.
In the experience economy, value is created when the internal environment produces clarity, and that clarity becomes visible externally. Long term advantage comes from coherence: a brand promise that is not only marketed, but operationalized through leadership behavior, employee rituals, and service delivery.
How are you and the recent developments in service culture contributing to and aligning with initiatives such as Saudi Vision 2030?
Vision 2030 is not only a strategic shift. It is a lived experience shift.
As services modernize and systems become smarter, the human layer must become more intentional. Culture becomes the stabilizer that ensures progress feels trustworthy and respectful at the point of experience.
My work aligns with that direction by focusing on how vision becomes behavior: how leaders model standards, how employees experience clarity and ownership, and how the customer experience reflects the same intent. Transformation becomes real when people can feel it without needing it explained.
What makes the perfect human centric ecosystem?
A human centric ecosystem is not one that removes standards. It is one that makes standards livable.
It is designed around three elements: clarity of expectations, trust in people, and accountability that improves capability rather than punishes honesty. In these environments, people are not trapped between rigid rules and vague freedom. They have direction and discretion.
The outcome is not only engagement. The outcome is judgment. When employees are equipped to make good decisions in real moments, the customer experience becomes stronger, more consistent, and more human.
What are some the best practice frameworks you have adopted?
I use frameworks as lenses, not templates.
I draw from service design, organizational psychology, and systems thinking, but I am careful about copying models without adapting them to context. What matters is coherence between what leaders intend, what employees experience, and what customers live.
Over time, this has evolved into a lens I call experience intelligence. It is the capacity to understand how culture, behavior, and systems interact, then design them so that performance and humanity reinforce each other.
How should culture be measured and governed?
Culture should be governed through behavior, not slogans.
Surveys can be useful, but the most revealing indicators are patterns: how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, what gets rewarded, and what gets tolerated. Culture is visible in repetition.
Governance requires ownership. It also requires feedback loops. When leaders treat culture as a system to steward, not a message to broadcast, measurement becomes an instrument for learning and alignment.
What is your leadership philosophy?
My leadership philosophy is stewardship.
Leaders do not create culture through speeches. They create it through what they model, what they reinforce, and what they protect. The most effective leaders create clarity, then give people the confidence to operate with judgment inside that clarity.
In practice, that means fewer grand statements and more consistent decisions. People trust behavior more than language.
What makes a great culture?
A great culture is one where standards are clear and dignity is non negotiable.
It creates direction without fear, accountability without humiliation, and performance without erosion. It makes it easy to do the right thing and difficult to do the wrong thing. It also evolves. A culture that cannot adapt becomes fragile.
What do you see as the future of leadership and work in the Middle East?
The future will reward leaders who can hold two truths at once: technology will accelerate, and humanity will become the differentiator.
As automation and AI grows, leadership will shift from managing tasks to designing environments. The organizations that endure will be those that build trust, not only efficiency, and those that protect judgment, not only compliance.
The region has a unique opportunity to define a leadership model that blends global excellence with deeply human values.
What is next for you?
My focus is on building scalable approaches to experience intelligence and human ecosystems by design.
I want to help more organizations move beyond isolated culture initiatives toward integrated systems where employee experience and customer experience are designed together, supported by leadership capability, and governed with discipline.
The work ahead is not about making organizations sound inspiring. It is about making them behave reliably, in a way that people can trust. That is the human advantage, and it is where I will continue to invest my work.
Where can readers connect and find out more about you?
Readers can connect with me on LinkedIn, where I share reflections on culture transformation, service culture, and the future of work. They can also find my longer form writing on Medium, where I explore experience intelligence, leadership behavior, and how human systems shape outcomes.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saja-badran-047397153/
