Dena Almansoori at e&: Fostering Culture Change at a UAE Telco Transforming to a Global Techco

Dena Almansoori, the first female and one of the youngest members of the United Arab Emirates-based e&’s leadership team, joined in 2020 just before e& began a strategic transition from being a regional telecommunications company to becoming a global technology company. As the group’s chief HR officer, Almansoori had a key role to play in this transition. Her mandate was to build a culture that was a “magnet” for top global talent, such that e& would compete with the likes of Amazon and Google not only for customers, but employees too. Many deemed this to be a radically ambitious goal. When Almansoori entered, the company had never had a town hall meeting; e& did not have standardized benefits for employees; employees called their managers by titles not names and needed their approval to apply for internal jobs. However, in two short years, Almansoori and other leaders had made “seismic” changes to the 70,000-person organization’s strategy, structure, talent profile, and people processes. Changing the “extremely hierarchical culture” that Almansoori saw as antithetical to being a tech company was a slower process. To speed it up, in a radical move for the organization and region, Almansoori rolled out a new internal mobility policy that encouraged employees to apply for internal jobs without asking their manager’s permission. It was a symbolic gesture of “taking control away from leaders and putting it in the hands of employees” and a mechanism for altering manager-employee interactions—an area Almansoori could not directly control. In contrast, her other HR initiatives did not directly impact power dynamics inside e&. As Almansoori assesses the policy’s progress one year on, she grapples with complaints from managers and employees, and senses that she might not have the full leadership team’s support. She is left grappling with if and how to amend the policy she intended as a bold stroke, realizing her actions are symbolically important for e&’s nascent culture change—and for her own credibility.