Pros
KEO is a genuine competitor to the big multinationals in the GCC and has name recognition through the UAE, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait, which is quite impressive for a family run business. KEO does get some impressive projects , colleagues are generally friendly and approachable, there is a sense of loyalty to staff by the directors (although this is eroding due to the market environment).
Cons
KEO is very top heavy with a lot of directors who draw fat salaries, and really have little impact on the direction of the company, therefore the fees have failed to adjust to the market and the mid level employees suffer in terms of pay cuts, and a "do more with less" attitude. Pay rises don't exist, its not uncommon to find really good employees on the same salary as five years previously, which saps morale as you know that no matter how well you do, you'll never get even a cost of living adjustment. If you are site based, there is little security, if the job ends you get a letter and unless they find something for you within a month you will stop getting paid unless you use your annual leave, for example if you finish a job on the 31st October and they get you to start another on 18th November, unless you use your leave in the interim you wont get paid for those 17 days in between. KEO preaches about the latest technology but seldom uses it (i.e BIM) as they charge it as an additional fee and clients seldom want to pay it. If one department has a project and they need another department to do some work, they are responsible for that departments profit and losd, which creates unnecessary friction. A lot of the engineering work is copy and paste as their simply aren't the staff to do any type of design and its cheaper to pay a draftsman to copy and paste, this then leads to problems at site, which the design teams will wash their hands of and just get the sote teams to deal with.