What is a PEO?

A professional employer organization (PEO) is essentially a human resources service provider that manages the responsibilities for SMEs, startups, and other companies. These responsibilities may include managing payroll, creating competitive benefits packages, and ensuring that your business remains compliant with the local labor laws of each country you hire from.

With the help of a PEO service, business owners don’t have to worry about taking on the tedious administrative payroll and HR tasks or spend on the money to hire an in-house team to take care of these things. This is because the PEO becomes your team — and at a much more attractive price point.

When you partner with a PEO, you can create an international team, hiring from any country you wish, including Qatar. Your PEO provider will ensure that they’re all onboarded, paid, and classified appropriately according to the local labor laws while also ensuring the statutory employer requirements are met. 

If you want to learn more about what a PEO service can do for your business, get in touch with a team member at Skuad today. You’ll get all your questions answered and receive the necessary guidance to help you make the right decisions regarding your international hiring.

What are the benefits of using a PEO provider in Qatar?

Working with a PEO in Qatar can open up a whole world of possibilities for your startup or small business. As you expand your workforce into Qatar, you’ll quickly realize why a PEO such as Skuad is an essential component to steady and successful business growth. 

Let’s take a look at the benefits.

You’ll get to hire the best of the best

When we say “the best of the best,” we don’t mean the best workers within a 15 mile radius. We’re talking about the best in the world — many of which may be in Qatar. These are highly skilled workers that you may not be able to find in your own country, or even other neighboring countries at the moment. 

Besides, why limit yourself? Remote work has evolved into something that has allowed global hiring to become feasible and give business a competitive edge. Since 2010, Qatar has been recognized as having the fastest growing economy in the world, and has also since significantly diversified its industry sectors.

Using a PEO in Qatar means you too can access the country’s top talent.

You’ll become a global competitor

Working with a PEO in Qatar and anywhere else for the matter means you can quite literally expand your business globally. This means you can grow your small business or SME indefinitely, becoming a force to be reckoned with in your industry on a much larger scale.

Additionally, PEO services in Qatar will have a firm understanding of the statutory benefits that employers are entitled to give their workers in the country — and they’ll help you level up with those benefits to remain competitive overseas.

You can cut unnecessary costs

Doing business in Qatar comes with significant expenses. They’re the type of expenses that can run a small business into the ground before it even takes off. 

When you partner with a PEO in Qatar, you’ll get a full suite of HR and legal services that can help you manage administrative tasks like payroll and reporting while ensuring you remain compliant with local labor laws at all times. You’ll get all of this for a fraction of what it would cost you to hire your own HR and legal teams.

You’ll gain experience in new markets

Doing business in Qatar means getting to know the Middle Eastern and Northern African markets. Using a PEO to hire employees in this region is the best way to get experience with these markets.

Your PEO services in Qatar will allow you to gain valuable market insights through your new employees from Qatar, which will help you to expand into the rest of the surrounding markets.

Skuad is the professional employer organization in Qatar that can get you there. Get in touch with a Skuad team member to talk about market insights today!

Avoid having to set up your own legal entity in Qatar

If you were to forgo using a PEO in Qatar to hire international employees, you would be stuck having to set up your own legal business structure within the country. This would be incredibly time consuming and more expensive than you can imagine as you would have to work with local legal council on a consistent basis. 

You would also have to physically be there to set up your entity, which means paying for travel and housing plus any other unforeseen costs. 

Using a PEO means you get to skip all of the frustration as PEOs in Qatar generally have their own legal entity already established. This is what allows them to act on your behalf when it comes to international hiring, management, and more.

You’ll become more culturally aware

Arguably the most important thing for a company to understand when hiring internationally is the cultural differences that exist. Your PEO in Qatar will make sure that you’re informed about these cultural differences as an employer of Qatar workers.

For example, Qatar is primarily a Muslim country. While the typical work week spans over six days with no more than 48 legal working hours, these hours are reduced to 36 during the month of the Islamic holiday of Ramadan.

Other things that you’ll need to know about the work culture in Qatar include:

• Overtime is paid at a rate of 25%-50% of an employee’s regular wages depending on the industry. 
• Employees are entitled to three weeks of paid vacation leave. Four weeks if they’ve worked for an employer for longer than five years.

• Employees are also entitled to two weeks of sick leave (with a doctor’s note) and 50 days maternity leave. There is no paternity leave, however, many employers choose to include it in their benefits packages.
• Employees are not subject to income tax
• Employees are generally paid once a month, and employers are expected to either pay for food and accommodations (depending on the industry) or an allowance of up to QAR 500 for accommodations and QAR 300 for food.

There’s a lot to learn about Qatar’s work culture, expectations, and labor laws. As your PEO in Qatar, Skuad will keep you culturally in-check.

What does it cost to build a team in Qatar?

The cost of building a team in Qatar largely depends on your definition of “team”. 

If you’re thinking about going the legal entity route, then you’re looking at spending a minimum of QAR 121,882.48. That’s US $33,484 and just to register — and that’s just for a company that’s classified as a Free Zone company. There are other types of legal entities you could form and they all have varying costs.

Not to mention, there are plenty of other associated costs involved, including the cost of hiring legal support to help you navigate Qatar’s business licensing laws, banking, office space, and much more.

However, if you partner with PEO services in Qatar instead, you’ll only have to pay a fraction of the cost of forming a legal entity. With Skuad, you can even get started for free to see how you like it and cancel at any time.

Here at Skuad, our PEO services begin at $19 per month, providing you with the means to onboard and pay your international employees in Qatar. If you need us to also act as your employer of record (EOR), to hire international employees on your behalf as well as manage your payroll, benefits, compliance, etc, prices begin at $199 per month.

We also serve enterprise businesses, which we offer customized prices for (just reach out to our team to talk business).

When you’re ready to start onboarding and paying employees in Qatar, book a demo to see how Skuad’s PEO services work. You won’t be disappointed!