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When Blessing Buraimoh talks about diversity and inclusion, she does not start with demographics. She starts with the systems those demographics sit inside: performance management, promotion calibration, compensation, leadership pipelines, investigations. As Head of Diversity and Inclusion at JLL’s EMEA Workforce Advisory, she has spent years pushing organizations to stop treating DEI as a side-of-desk commitment and start treating it like any other strategic discipline, with owners, metrics, and consequences.
Our conversation with Blessing covered the ground most DEI discussions skip. How do you hold senior leaders accountable when the outcomes feel slow and noisy. How do you build intersectional programs that reflect how people actually experience the workplace. And how do People teams keep momentum when the political weather around DEI shifts from quarter to quarter.
What follows is a practical distillation of that discussion, layered with the research and structural guidance HR leaders need to translate her point of view into action.
Why DEI Accountability Fails Without Structural Ownership
The first thing Blessing pushes back on is the assumption that DEI accountability lives with the Chief Diversity Officer. It does not. In her view, DEI accountability is a distributed function. Every hiring manager, every calibration lead, every investigator, and every executive sponsor owns a piece of it. The CDO’s job is to make those owners legible and visible, not to do the work for them.
That distributed model matches what the research shows. McKinsey’s most recent diversity report finds that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on executive teams are 39 percent more likely to financially outperform peers, but the companies that actually capture that upside are the ones that place core-business leaders at the heart of the I&D effort and hold them to account for progress.
That is the premise Blessing starts from. Accountability has to be a property of the system, not a memo. And the system she points to sits across the AllVoices diversity, equity, and inclusion solutions surface area: representation data, hiring pipelines, ER trend lines, and leadership behavior, all visible in the same place.
How Intersectionality Reshapes the Measurement Stack
Blessing is unambiguous that a DEI scorecard without intersectionality will miss the story. Aggregate representation numbers hide within-group disparities. A company can look broadly diverse and still be quietly grinding down women of color, disabled LGBTQ+ employees, or working mothers in mid-level roles.
She recommends three shifts. First, layer your data so you can see identity combinations, not just single dimensions. Second, tie qualitative listening to those segments through structured employee feedback channels. Third, read ER intake data by identity so you know which groups are disproportionately raising concerns. Those three moves turn intersectionality from a talking point into a measurement discipline.
What does intersectional measurement actually look like
Start with representation at every level of the org, cut by at least two identity dimensions at once. Then overlay promotion velocity, pay equity gaps, retention, engagement scores, and ER case volume. The picture that emerges is rarely flattering, and it is always more useful than a single diversity percentage in a year-end report.
How do you protect privacy while getting this granular
Work with legal and privacy counsel to set minimum cell sizes, suppress any segment with fewer than a defined threshold of employees, and pull trend data rather than individual data. You do not need to identify a person to spot a pattern.
What Actually Works When You Rebuild a DEI Strategy
Blessing’s experience across JLL and earlier roles points to a short list of moves that separate programs that compound from programs that stall.
Principle 1: Tie DEI goals to executive scorecards
If representation, promotion equity, and inclusion sentiment are not on the same scorecard as revenue and cost, they will lose. Blessing recommends explicit targets attached to named executives, reviewed at the same cadence as business results. Many of the programs SHRM has tracked quietly rethinking their DEI strategy are keeping the substance and moving it into the business accountability stack, which is exactly the direction she advocates.
Principle 2: Treat ER data as a DEI signal
Employee relations intake is the richest, least-tapped DEI dataset in most companies. It tells you where psychological safety is thin, which managers escalate issues versus suppress them, and where retaliation patterns form. When you pair ER trend analysis with representation data, you stop debating whether a culture problem exists and start pinpointing where.
Principle 3: Build listening loops people actually trust
Sentiment data is only useful when employees believe their input will not be punished. That means clear anti-retaliation policies, named handlers for each category of concern, and visible follow-through. Blessing emphasizes that the loop has to close with action, not with a slide in the next all-hands.
Where Employee Relations Fits in a Modern DEI Operating Model
One of the sharpest points in the conversation is that DEI and Employee Relations are not adjacent functions. They are the same function measured from different angles. DEI tells you the composition of your workforce. ER tells you how that composition gets treated. Read together, they tell the truth.
This is where tooling matters. The AllVoices HR case management platform lets People teams see concerns segmented by identity, track resolution quality by manager, and connect themes back to DEI goals. And for companies running thousands of intake conversations a year, Vera, the AllVoices AI co-pilot for employee relations, standardizes how cases get triaged so underserved groups are not quietly filtered out at the front door.
How ER accountability plugs into executive DEI goals
Roll ER themes into the quarterly business review. If a business unit has outsized bullying, discrimination, or retaliation volume compared to its headcount share, that is not an HR footnote. It is a leadership performance indicator. Name it, own it, and track whether the numbers move.
Frequently Asked Questions About DEI Accountability
What does DEI accountability mean in practical terms
It means named owners, specific targets, and a review rhythm that mirrors how the business tracks any other strategic priority. Representation, promotion equity, pay equity, ER case patterns, and inclusion sentiment all get owners and numeric goals. When goals miss, the conversation sounds like a business review, not a values pep talk.
How do you measure intersectional outcomes without violating privacy
Use minimum cell sizes, suppress micro-segments, and report at trend and aggregate levels rather than individual levels. Most DEI questions can be answered with four to six quarters of blended data rather than named records. Work with privacy and legal counsel from day one, not at the end.
Who should own DEI accountability, the CDO or the CEO
Both, with distinct roles. The CEO owns the outcome. The CDO owns the operating model. Hiring managers and executives own execution inside their functions. The worst pattern is a CDO reporting four layers down with no direct link to the executive scorecard, and the best is an operating model that names ownership for every metric.
How does ER data strengthen a DEI program
It exposes where representation numbers hide problems. A team can look diverse on paper and still run a culture that produces disproportionate complaints from underrepresented groups. Trend analysis across intake, investigation, and resolution quality tells a truth that surveys and headcount reports cannot.
What if political pressure makes DEI language risky in public reporting
Keep the work. Rename the scorecard if you must, but do not dismantle the measurement system. The companies that survive these cycles with healthy cultures are the ones that preserve the underlying discipline while adjusting the external vocabulary to match what employees, regulators, and customers actually care about.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Blessing’s message to People leaders was blunt. Stop framing DEI as a separate moral effort and start integrating it into the performance machinery that already runs your company. Put the targets on executive scorecards. Read representation, promotions, pay, ER, and sentiment as one connected picture. Build listening and reporting loops employees actually trust.
The organizations that keep making progress through political swings are not the ones with the loudest public commitments. They are the ones with the sharpest internal plumbing. When the operating model is strong, the outcomes survive whichever way the wind blows.
If you want to see how AllVoices brings ER data, case management, and inclusion analytics into a single operating view, schedule a product walkthrough with our team.
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